


Where We Are Wanted

by moonix



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Magic, Anonymous Pen Pals, Canonical Character Death, Dark-ish Academia, Enemies With Benefits, Enemies to Lovers, Exy (All For The Game), Hogwarts-style magic university, M/M, Minor Character Death, Murder Mystery, Secrets, Wannabe detective Neil Josten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:02:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29132268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: A dead student. A traitorous note. A secluded campus deep in the woods. And secrets that are starting to unravel...Between playing an illegal sport, trying to track down a murderer, and secretly hooking up with his former nemesis, Neil's second year at Morgan University promises to keep him on his toes - if it doesn't kill him first.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 103
Kudos: 448





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> How many brain cells does it take to come up with one (1) plot? I couldn't tell you. I fried all of mine writing this fic.
> 
> Chapter updates will be posted about once a week, or sooner depending on when I get around to editing them.
> 
> Content warnings: murder, past rape, torture - none of those are really discussed in gory depth but if you are wary about reading, feel free to ask for more details!

_“Shit, shit, shit,” Neil muttered around the pencil in his mouth, rummaging around in his bag as he skidded down the hall, late for his first ever class at Morgan University._

_Somehow, he’d thought he’d have more time._

_More time to prepare, to get in the mind-set of a good student, to copy Kevin’s bullet journal and organise his textbooks according to which days of the week he’d need them. Instead he’d spent the night before hiding from everyone else and having a panic attack in the bathroom after the welcome feast, and now it was Monday morning and Neil had neither showered nor, apparently, packed a notebook or anything to write on._

_He tried to sneak into the classroom as inconspicuously as possible, ignoring Kevin’s appalled look, and promptly made a huge racket stumbling over the bin by the door. Face burning, he ducked into the nearest free seat, next to a short blond guy with his hood up who was openly napping. The professor went back to outlining the syllabus for the semester and Neil caught his breath, ran a hand through his unwashed hair, and flicked his pencil to get rid of some of the nervous energy coursing through him._

_His foot caught on something, and he bent down to pick up a scrap piece of paper that looked like it had been ripped out of a notebook. It was blank, so he shrugged and started copying down the syllabus, though he got distracted watching the students around him halfway through. By the end of the class, the paper was covered in doodles and sketches and a few cryptic notes that he couldn’t even remember taking. He spotted Kevin making his way over to him and quickly stuffed it in his pocket in case he wanted to compare notes._

_The guy next to him still looked fast asleep, and Neil hesitated._

_“Hey,” Kevin said, “what did you think about-”_

_“Should we wake him?” Neil asked, nodding at the napper._

_“Hm? Oh, no,” Kevin said, tugging Neil out of the row and down the stairs. “That’s Andrew Minyard. Steer clear of him from now on.”_

_“Sure,” Neil said, bemused. “Let’s go have lunch, I’m starving.”_

_“You wouldn’t be if you’d been on time for breakfast,” Kevin sniffed, but followed him out into the bustle of the hallways. It was a sunny autumn day, golden and perfect like a ripe pear, and Neil breathed in the scent of old books, woodsmoke and floor polish that lingered in the halls, shedding the last of his apprehension about starting a new chapter of his life._

_It wasn’t until later that evening that he retrieved the crumpled piece of paper from his bag and saw that his notes and drawings were gone, and had instead been replaced with a messy scrawl:_

**_This bodes well for your academic career_ **

_It was unsigned, and Neil held it up to the light and turned it this way and that, but it still looked like a perfectly normal piece of paper. Glancing around the empty dorm, he snatched up one of Kevin’s fancy fountain pens and wrote:_

_Who are you?_

-

“Neil! Catch!”

Neil’s hand shot up on autopilot, closing around the small glass sphere that Marissa had lobbed at him. He didn’t look up from his book until he noticed the hush that had fallen over the room, and by then it was too late: the neon red smoke coiling like a many-headed snake inside the sphere was clearly visible between the loose grasp of his fingers.

“Ohh,” Marissa whispered. “Oh, Neil.”

“What,” Neil frowned, squinting at the writhing smoke. He shook it, but the smoke merely swirled a little faster. “Did I break it?”

“No, silly,” Katelyn grinned. “That’s a Loves-Me-Not.”

“Bless you,” Neil said, dropping the sphere on top of Kevin’s essay and smudging the still-drying ink.

“Careful!” Kevin snapped. He extricated his essay out from under the sphere, which had dulled to a cloudy grey.

“Red smoke means you’re pining after someone,” Marissa explained, leaning over the back of the couch Neil was sprawled on and leering down at him. “So. Who is it?”

Neil couldn’t hold back a derisive snort.

“Really? Did you get that in Bogus?”

“It’s not from a joke shop!” Marissa said indignantly. “It’s a legit artefact! My grandmother passed it down to me! The smoke changes shape and colour depending on your romantic status.”

“They’re pretty rare,” Katelyn agreed, picking up the Loves-Me-Not from where it had rolled onto the faded gold and purple rug in front of the fireplace. The substance inside separated into tiny, fluffy white clouds backlit by an invisible sun, and she smiled at it.

“Ugh, Kate, that’s disgustingly wholesome,” Marissa pouted, swiping the sphere out of her hand. She looked a little forlorn at the nondescript fog swirling through the glass. “Wish I had someone to pine for, too.”

“Neil isn’t pining,” Kevin scoffed. “He needs to focus on his studies.”

“What he said,” Neil yawned, picking his book back up.

“Oh yeah?” Katelyn huffed and turned to Kevin. “You try it, then. Let’s see if we get another false positive.”

“Wouldn’t be false though,” Neil muttered. “He’s totally pining after J-”

He had to roll off the sofa to duck the shut-up hex Kevin zapped his way. Kevin pinched the Loves-Me-Not between two disgusted fingers, handing it back to Marissa. The smoke inside blushed a shy orange-pink like a sunrise and Marissa giggled before taking it from him.

“Adoration,” she said knowingly. “Kevin, I didn’t know you had it in you. Who is it?”

“Jeremy Knox,” Neil offered from the floor before Kevin could lob another hex at him.

“In the _purely academic_ _sense_ ,” Kevin stressed, staring intensely down at his essay. He had a perfectly good laptop, yet he insisted on writing out every first draft by hand. It would be an altogether different essay by the time it was typed up, and even then Kevin sometimes rewrote entire sections at the last minute before handing it in with thirty seconds to spare to the deadline.

“Mhmm,” Katelyn grinned.

“Did someone say my name?” Jeremy piped up from where he was sprawled out in front of the fireplace, head pillowed in Laila’s lap. “Hey, Mari, what you got there?”

A few more people had moved in, casually curious about the novel item. When Jeremy took it, it blazed gold like the sun, making Laila grumble about her eyes. Some people, like Matt, got the same happily settled result as Katelyn, while others were smug or disappointed by the blanks they drew, similar to Marissa. Neil didn’t pay much attention to most of them, but it was hard to focus back on his reading and Marissa and Katelyn had claimed his spot on the couch, leafing furiously through the guidebook to interpret everyone’s results.

Inevitably, Neil’s gaze was drawn to the armchair by the window. There was nothing noteworthy about the armchair—it was the same ugly, squashed, slightly scuffed brown as all the other armchairs in the common room, standing at an angle next to one of the bookcases so that it overlooked the room while also providing a view of the forest beyond the window, and it was currently unoccupied.

“Neil,” Katelyn said, leaning over the edge of the couch to wave her hand in front of his face. “Earth to Neil. The results are in.”

“It was right on the nose every single time,” Marissa gloated.

“That was not a controlled experiment,” Neil pointed out.

“You’re just grumpy because it caught you out,” Marissa said, rolling her eyes. “Admit it. You’re pining.”

“Alright,” Neil said, swinging himself upright. “You got me. I am pining…”

He stood up, stretching obnoxiously, then pulled on his shoes and stepped carefully over Kevin and his seventeen open textbooks.

“…for a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich,” he finished with a wink over his shoulder, leaning against the wall next to the fireplace until it swung inward, tumbling him out into the hallway beyond. It ground shut again behind him, cutting off Marissa’s protest, and he put his hands in his pockets and turned left after getting his bearings.

The passage was a good way to get out of unwanted conversations, because it led somewhere different every time he used it. The downside was that you had about equal chances of being spat out on the other side of campus from wherever you’d been meaning to go, but Neil didn’t mind stretching his legs a bit. He’d been zoning out for the past half hour and probably wasn’t going to get any more studying done tonight, anyway.

There was, however, one other person who’d somehow figured out how to find Neil no matter where the passage dropped him off.

Neil became aware of his presence no less than five seconds after he’d started walking and tried not to panic, keeping his eyes on the wall sconce at the end of the hallway. Footsteps fell into place just behind him, and Neil fought their pull for a moment before stopping outside an unused seminar room and letting himself be crowded up against the door.

“Pining, Wesninski?” Andrew greeted him, a smirk crouching low in the corner of his mouth. “Why, you should have said something.”

His voice riffled through Neil’s thoughts like a sudden gust of wind, dislodging loose ends and leaving chaos in its wake. Neil bit the tip of his tongue hard.

“I’m not the one who keeps following me around like a lovesick puppy.”

“Are you complaining,” Andrew murmured, eyes dropping to Neil’s mouth.

Instead of replying, Neil pushed the door open and stepped backwards into the classroom. Andrew tumbled after him, kicked the door shut and walked him over to a desk, sliding between Neil’s legs as he opened them.

The thing about Andrew Minyard was—actually, there were a lot of things about Andrew Minyard.

Enough to make Neil’s head spin on a good day.

He was an asshole, for one. Neil was supposed to hate him—had hated him for his entire first year at Morgan, after what he’d done to Matt. It had been easy to hate him: his barbed, dismissive insults, his apathetic disinterest, his open dislike of Neil’s friends, how casually he squandered his magic, the way he always managed to zero in on someone’s weak spots. Andrew only had to look at Neil wrong and Neil’s temper would flare, crackling and popping like wet fireworks, even though he knew that it would just fuel Andrew’s endless amusement. Andrew had a habit of always showing up where Neil was, and for a while Neil had been paranoid that Andrew had put some sort of tracking spell on him, until Kevin had sat him down in the library and made him read every book on tracking spells they could find. All of their tests came up negative, so Neil had to concede that Andrew was just very dedicated to tormenting him personally.

Neil would have happily gone on hating Andrew Minyard until the day Andrew graduated university and left Neil’s life forever, except then two things had happened in quick succession: Neil had found out by accident that Andrew was his secret anonymous pen pal that he’d spent the last year pouring his heart out to on magically enhanced paper, and Andrew had kissed him.

And, well.

Andrew was a really, really good kisser.

Neil hummed and let Andrew mouth along the tendon in his throat while one hand pulled his head back by the hair, sending tiny, pleasant shivers down his spine. He was about to ask where he could touch when his eyes landed on the whiteboard at the front of the room and he froze.

“What,” Andrew grunted, straightening to look at him. Neil nodded at the whiteboard, which had the word MURDERER written across it in large, poisonously green letters.

Andrew huffed and rolled his eyes before turning back to the task of mapping out Neil’s neck with his mouth.

“Allison again?” Neil asked, still staring at the glowing letters. They seemed to sear themselves deeper into his retinas the longer he looked, until he saw them superimposed on everything he looked at. Andrew merely grunted again and Neil nudged him away from his neck. “Do you want me to tell her?”

“Tell her what.”

“That you didn’t do it.”

Andrew looked at him with the same blank expression as always, but there was a tightness around his mouth that Neil was starting to recognise.

“And how do you know that,” he said.

“We were in the gear closet the night Seth was killed,” Neil reminded him. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not putting it past you to snuff out someone’s existence with your mind alone if you really tried, but if I remember correctly you had my dick _pretty_ far down your throat.”

Andrew raised an eyebrow at him. Neil would be lying if he said that eyebrow didn’t do things to his insides.

“I could have a dick in my throat again,” Andrew said. “If said dick didn’t insist on making small-talk.”

“Murder is hardly small-talk,” Neil said, wiggling his fingers at the whiteboard. Andrew wiped a hand through the air and the letters disappeared.

“Just because I was too busy sucking dick to kill Gordon does not mean Reynolds is wrong,” he murmured, cupping Neil’s face and nudging it until he looked at him again.

Neil rolled his eyes and snuck a quick kiss onto the side of Andrew’s mouth.

“About that,” he said, smirking when Andrew pushed him down on the desk.

-

_Where do banished banshees go_

**_It’s 2 in the fucking morning_ **

_So? You’re clearly up too_

**_My bad_ **

**_Go to sleep_ **

_Shalln’t_

**_That’s not a word_ **

_My bad_

_I shon’t_

**_Your parents must have spent a lot of money buying your spot at Morgan_ **

_Oh they did_

_Joke’s on them really_

**_Clearly_ **

_Okay but_

_Where DO banished banshees go_

**_Hawaii_ **

_…Hawaii_

**_They need a holiday too_ **

_Right_

_Of course_

_Why didn’t I think of that_

**_You never think_ **

**_Except at 2 in the fucking morning apparently_ **

_Hmm_

_Do you think jellyfish ever sting themselves by accident_

-

Morgan University was hidden in the deepest part of the woods. Which woods was irrelevant—if you asked the professors, you merely got a shrug or a stern look in response. If you asked Kevin, you got a convoluted lecture on quantum magic that no one could ever follow. The trees around Morgan were improbably tall and impossibly green no matter the season. Their needles were plush and buttery soft, and very stubborn about clinging to everything. Neil routinely had to empty his shoes out of the window even if all he’d done that day was sit in classrooms. Over his time here he’d tried to map out the forest on his morning runs, but no matter how hard he pushed himself, he never broke through the trees in any direction.

Most days of the week, a little village stopped by the woods.

Or maybe the woods stopped by the village—Neil wasn’t sure. In any case, it usually wasn’t there on Sundays and tended to wink out of existence every second Tuesday night of the month.

The village was called St Yves, lovingly nicknamed St Knives by the student body, for reasons no student remembered anymore. It had a pub, the Cauldron’s Well, where students went to drink away their academic woes, have philosophic debates, and drown their sorrows in ale and pies of all shapes, sizes and flavours. The pub moved around too, but was usually to be found along the outskirts of the market square, which bustled with faded candy-cane-striped awnings, steaming hot gossip, misshapen vegetables, and useless but charming trinkets. The tiny coffee cart was open 24/7 as far as Neil could tell and only made one type of coffee: black, bitter, and strong as an ox.

He paid for his coffee, wrapping his hands around the cup and sipping at the bracingly potent brew, and wandered down the main street past the Sleeping Cat bookshop (the cat in question, an enormous white Maine Coon, was currently sleeping in the window display) and Humbug, an old and retro-looking ice cream and sweet shop that enjoyed great popularity among the student body of Morgan. An overcrowded little tea shop was dolloped on the corner, breathing fragrant steam through the open door and trying to catch Neil’s attention with a luxurious display of cakes teased high with buttercream, crackly cinnamon sugar scones, plump honeyed pumpkin buns studded with fat raisins and pistachios, and hot sausages wrapped in pastry and staining their napkins with dark juices. A large, good-natured man called Erik was working behind the counter. He waved at Neil as he passed by and Neil nodded back reservedly, not sure why Erik always insisted on being so damn friendly. Once he’d finished his coffee and peered inside a few more window displays, Neil let himself be drawn in by the narrow, red-painted shop front of Bogus & Sons and ducked as a pair of golden origami owls zoomed straight for his head the minute he opened the door.

“Neil!”

The man who owned the joke shop was neither called Bogus nor did he have any sons. He was, however, Neil’s uncle—not that biological relation meant very much to Neil these days, but at least Stuart was fairly harmless in comparison to the rest of his family.

Well, as harmless as the owner of a joke shop could be.

“Hello, Uncle Stuart,” Neil said, stuffing his hands in his pockets and leaning carefully out of hugging range just in case, even though Stuart was currently tangled up in several feet of what looked like sentient and vaguely murderous cassette tape. Being around his touchy-feely friends had not made Neil more inclined to accept physical affection; if anything, it had made him more paranoid about it being sprung on him in an unsuspecting moment, so he still approached warily.

“I’ll be with you in a jiffy,” Stuart huffed, tugging on a loop of tape that was making a half-hearted attempt at strangling him. “Let me just tidy up some odds and ends.”

He disappeared back into what he called “the laboratory”, and Neil ambled over to check one of the newer displays, ignoring the loud thumps coming from the back room. He was inspecting a pair of prank handcuffs that only opened if you asked them nicely when there was the muffled sound of an explosion, then Stuart made a tape-free but slightly singed entrance, carrying a tea tray.

“I just had breakfast,” Neil said, meekly accepting a cup of tea and a finger sandwich anyway and sinking into the plush chair behind the counter.

“They don’t feed you enough at that school,” Stuart clucked. “You’re all skin and bones.”

Neil had always been small and flighty no matter how much he ate, just like Mary and Stuart. It was in his genes, though he neglected to point that out and took another finger sandwich instead, propping his foot on the edge of the chair and spinning it around from side to side.

“Excuse me,” the air in front of the counter said, “do you have any accidental invisibility reversers?”

“Try the sixth floor,” Stuart said, tapping a floor-length ornate sign beside the counter stating that Bogus & Sons took no legal responsibility for improper use of their products. The spindly spiral staircase leading to the upper floors heaved and shuddered under someone’s weight, and Stuart shook his head.

“Any news on that poor dead boy?” he asked. “Such terrible business.”

“No,” Neil said, fiddling with a pen that only wrote swearwords. “MLE thinks he overdosed because he was into hallucinogenic potions, but Allison swears he was clean at the time. She thinks he was murdered.”

“Murdered? Dear god-”

Stuart was about to say more when a customer accidentally triggered one of the nighttime spheres on display in the back of the shop. Inky darkness billowed out of it like smoke, and Stuart sighed and muttered something about warnings and signs under his breath as he bustled off to deal with it. Neil peered into the teapot and, upon seeing that it was down to its dregs, picked it up and carried it into the back room to brew another batch.

Stuart’s kettle was a slow, sullen thing. Neil snapped his fingers at it, sparking a heating charm between them, but it steadfastly refused to go any faster. He huffed and walked around the laboratory instead, peeking into cauldrons, peering at the rows and rows of dark apothecary flasks and bottles lined up on the shelves. He was inspecting a new prototype for a set of shrinking keys when he heard the jingling of the doorbell and a familiar voice alongside Stuart’s.

“…potion that masks taste without tampering with the properties,” Andrew was saying.

“Ah, yes, I have just the thing,” Stuart replied. “Quite handy for getting little children to drink a cough potion, I say. Though, of course, there are other uses…”

Curious, Neil peeked out through a small gap in the door. Stuart had gone off to fetch the potion, leaving Andrew standing in a patch of sunlight by the counter. The light swirled his hair into peaks of fresh meringue and smouldered in his eyelashes as he blinked drowsily, tapping his fingers against the counter while he waited. Neil was struck with the sudden realisation that somewhere along the way, he had started to be attracted to Andrew Minyard.

Fucking hell.

The kettle whistled sharply and he winced, turning back to the little hob and sink unit by the wall. By the time he had a fresh pot brewing, Stuart had returned with the potion and completed the transaction, and Neil was almost disappointed when he came out with the tray only to catch the door swinging shut on the once-more empty patch of sunlight.

-

_Chocolate orange_

**_Chocolate orange is not a flavour_ **

_Um of course it is hello_

_It’s chocolate… and orange_

**_You don’t get to have an opinion on this_ **

**_You don’t even like sweets_ **

_Last I checked liking something was not a prerequisite to having an opinion about it_

_What’s yours then_

**_Honeycomb_ **

_How is honeycomb a flavour but chocolate orange isn’t_

_At least orange is a discernible flavour_

_Honeycomb is just sweet_

**_Your tastebuds must be so shrivelled up from all the bullshit you spout_ **

-

It took a well-placed minor explosion to escape from Stuart’s clutches, but Neil managed to catch up with Andrew as he was just entering another shop further down the street. He quickly stopped and renewed the notice-me-not spell he’d cast on himself when he’d decided to follow Andrew, then pulled his hood up for good measure and slipped into the shop after a group of girls who were discussing their skincare routines in unfathomable depth. Immediately a heavy, blossomy scent enveloped him and he muffled a surprised sneeze in his elbow. It was somewhere between a flower shop and a bakery, a heady mix of jasmine and vanilla and powdered sugar.

The shop was called Fizzes and seemed to be dedicated solely to a wide range of bath bombs in all colours of the rainbow. They were stacked into sculptures and pyramids on small display tables and lined every inch of visible wall space, creating the illusion of being inside an old-fashioned bubblegum dispenser filled with giant candy pieces.

The bath bombs were laced with charms and had quirky names like _Cauldron Full of Clouds_ , _A Dark and Stormy Bath Time,_ and _Visit from the Pumpkin Queen_. Neil watched as Andrew picked up a spiky black monstrosity called _Eldritch Horror_ which promised to bring eternal night upon one’s bathroom (and also smell like chocolate and cherries) and had to suppress a laugh.

Half an hour later, Neil had somehow acquired three bath bombs of his own ( _Magic Massage,_ for easing sore muscles after exercising; _Naked,_ which had charms for soothing scar tissue and irritated skin; and _Clear Blue Skies_ , a bath that claimed to make you feel like you were flying, though Neil was going to be the judge of that). He spent far too much money on them and the bag rustled and smacked against his legs as he walked, trying to keep up with Andrew without giving himself away just yet. There was something exhilarating about just following him at a distance, getting to see a loose, relaxed side of him that he didn’t normally present around anyone on campus.

Andrew dipped in and out of shops for a while, never really buying anything. Sometimes he looked almost forlorn, like a kid outside a candy shop without any pocket money to spend. He ran his fingers over packaging and price tags, sucked absently on his bottom lip as he studied ingredient lists, tapped on all the toys that were on display outside Jiggle & Fidget to make them move, light up or sing. In the end he got a single pair of black socks that were on sale, a box of condoms, and a packet of cat treats, even though Neil was pretty sure he didn’t own one.

He was just wondering what Andrew had bought them for, rounding another corner, when he found himself pressed up against the rough brick wall outside the apothecary.

“This game is getting boring,” Andrew murmured, his warm breath swooping over the shell of Neil’s ear and making him shiver. “What prize do I get?”

“How about a bath bomb?” Neil offered, holding up his bag. He felt giddy, almost fizzy from Andrew’s proximity, noting with glee that the sweet, floral scent of the bath bomb shop still permeated Andrew’s black clothing as well. “Or I could blow you for once.”

“You wish,” Andrew huffed, flicking his ear.

“Maybe I do,” Neil grinned. “You never let me have any fun.”

“This,” Andrew said, gesturing between them, “is not fun. It is purely transactional.”

“Hardly a transaction if you give me orgasms but won’t let me reciprocate.”

Andrew raised his eyebrow.

“Didn’t hear you complaining last time you came all over my shirt.”

“It was a nice shirt,” Neil smirked.

“Shut up,” Andrew said, and set about collecting his winnings from Neil’s willing lips.

-

**_Are you going home for the holidays_ **

_Staying with a friend_

_You?_

**_Family_ **

_But not home?_

**_Maybe_ **

_Do you think this’ll still work?_

**_Guess we will find out_ **

-

Neil’s favourite thing about Morgan University was Exy.

Since Exy was officially banned on university grounds, there were very few rules. It was played in the air, which meant you needed either some sort of aerial transport object that you could competently manoeuver while also holding a racquet, or you had to constantly cast hovering and leaping charms to keep yourself afloat. There were three balls in play at all times, all of which could be used to score with though they provided different amounts of points and were more or less inclined to follow the rules of physics. The more temperamental and elusive the ball, the higher the amount of points a goal brought in.

The use of magic was encouraged, though certain spells had been banned after some of the more gruesome accidents that had occurred in game over the years. Permanently maiming an opponent was frowned upon and transformations to such a scale as to seriously skew the odds in one team’s favour had also fallen out of fashion, mostly due to the damages that the court usually sustained from them.

Like the woods and the village, the court moved around a lot. Most of the professors at Morgan were aware of the illicit games taking place but couldn’t prove anything or track down individual players. The rosters for each game were highly secret, the players masked and known only by their numbers, and they changed teams about as often as they changed their disguises. Spectators had to take an oath of silence and received note of a game happening with little to no advance warning, with coded messages sent to their phones from an anonymous number and a take-me-there spell that would transport them directly to the venue once activated. Bets were placed on the outcome of each game, and individual players’ stats also counted into a semester-long Fantasy Exy league that students could sign up for, “buying” players to form their own individual fantasy teams and rack up points if they did well.

It was brilliant, and thrilling, and would cost everyone involved their spots at Morgan if they were dumb enough to get caught, but Neil wouldn’t miss it for the world.

He had signed up on his first day and been given the number ten, which had slowly built up favour in the league as Neil practiced in secret and got in as much game time as he could. It wasn’t an easy feat with both of his parents and Kevin breathing down his neck about his grades, though Kevin at least also played and so understood Neil’s obsession. Technically no one was supposed to know who any of the players were, but Neil had pretty good guesses about most of them by now. Matt had blabbed to him straight away after his first game, and some of the others, like Dan and Renee, had slowly revealed themselves over time. Jeremy and Jean, two former players now in their last year, had taken on commentating the games and were a big hit with their good-cop-bad-cop routine that perfectly suited Jeremy’s excitable Labrador personality and Jean’s surlier demeanour. An anonymous committee was the mastermind behind the league, with Allison as their official spokesperson—as Allison’s parents were one of Morgan’s prime financers, it was unlikely she would face any real repercussions if she was found out.

Kevin still clung to the belief that no one knew he was the famous number two, current top ranked striker of the league after surpassing the number one, who’d been the long-standing champion for several seasons running. As for the number three, Neil was fairly sure that he was the only one outside the committee who’d figured out that the top ranked goalie was none other than Andrew himself.

About once a week, Neil and his friends met at the Cauldron’s Well to discuss the newest developments, argue over their virtual team rosters, and try to figure out the identities of the players they didn’t know. Number three was a recurring topic of debate, but for some reason Neil still wanted to keep that particular secret to himself.

He slid down in his seat, drowsy from making out with Andrew in the cold for so long and lulled by the heat of the fire and the low rumble of conversation around him. The air was heavy with the smell of ale and pie and damp jackets, and the mood was less merry than usual, Seth’s and Allison’s absence having made a noticeable dent in their seating arrangements.

“So, Neil,” Dan said, nudging him and smiling brightly in a blatant attempt to pull the conversation out of its current sinkhole. “What’s this I heard about you pining for someone?”

“Nothing,” Neil said, sliding down a little further. “Slander and lies.”

“Neil, buddy,” Matt insisted. “Everyone else’s was spot on. Alvarez even got down on one knee and propositioned Laila when it turned out they were both crushing on someone they suspected might feel the same.”

“There’s no way a dumb glass ball can know that,” Neil grumbled, stealing a sip of Matt’s ale and making a face. “And this beer is disgusting.”

“There were a few people who refused to do it,” Kevin pointed out. “There’s no conclusive evidence that-”

“Did Marissa get Andrew Minyard?” Neil asked casually, then wished he could take it back. There was no way Andrew would have played along, but even if he had, Neil didn’t actually want to know.

“Oof, can you imagine?” Dan laughed. “It would probably turn into a black hole or something.”

“Hey, don’t change the subject,” Matt grinned, poking him. As punishment, Neil stole another sip of his revolting beer.

“No need to be embarrassed, Neil,” Renee said softly, then blushed a little. “You’re not the only one who got pining.”

Neil quirked an eyebrow.

“Oh?”

Renee merely hummed and didn’t explain, so Neil stopped himself from prodding further, though he did wonder who might have caught Renee’s interest. She didn’t act any differently around any of their friends. Andrew was the only person she spent any amount of time with outside of the group, and—oh.

Shit.

Maybe they had both got the same result _because they were both pining for the same person_.

Neil took another swig of Matt’s ale to swallow that down. He knew Andrew was into guys, of course, but for all Neil knew he might be bi, and Renee was also the only person Andrew spent any time with other than his family and Neil, so it was possible she had more of a fighting chance than she thought. Or maybe they were already hooking up, the way Neil and Andrew were—

He shook his head. It was no use ruminating on it. Neil’s pen pal persona might be one of the only people Andrew opened up to, but the real Neil was still only a means to an end for Andrew. Just because Neil’s mind had been able to reunite his arch nemesis with the person he’d been writing letters to for months didn’t mean that Andrew would see it as anything other than betrayal.

He should probably stop hooking up with him.

Probably.

Soon…

“Neil? Neil, mate, I love you, but I’m not carrying you back to the dorms.”

Neil sighed and rolled sideways out of the booth, yawning as he stood. He spent the walk back to campus alternating between leaning on Matt, Dan and Kevin in turn until they shook him off, trying to get enough oxygen into his brain so he’d be able to finish his essay before bed. What woke him up in the end was not the brisk scent of pine needles though, but the shock of light spilling from the open front doors of the university and the figure standing at the top of the stairs looking white as a ghost.

“It happened again,” Allison greeted them, trembling in her nightgown. Renee hurried up the last few steps to her side.

“What happened again?” she asked in a soothing voice. Allison sagged the moment she’d wrapped a guiding arm around her shoulders.

“Kengo Moriyama,” Allison said, shaking. “He’s dead.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I say Monday? My bad.

_Hey so remember when we said we weren’t going to exchange names_

_I was thinking_

**_Uh oh_ **

_We could use numbers, like Exy players_

**_No_ **

_Damn okay_

-

Strictly speaking, Morgan University didn’t have a headmaster. The heads of department made up a board that consulted on all academic and administrative decisions. Kengo Moriyama had taken the chair a few years before and was acting as head of department for both the Magical Engineering and Technology department and the Spellwork, Spell Development and Cursebreaking department, two of the largest departments on campus.

“He was poisoned,” Allison said when they had bundled her into an armchair by the fireplace. The grey tinge to her skin was gone, replaced with ruddy determination, and her hands were steady where they gripped the cup of hot cocoa with rum that Dan had procured for her. “Kayleigh found him dead in his office just after dinner. They tried to revive him, but it was too late.”

“Do they know who did it?” Dan asked, bracing her elbows on her knees. Allison shook her head.

“Not officially, no,” she sniffed. “But it’s only a matter of time. I mean, we all know who killed Seth.”

“Uh,” Matt said. “Do we?”

Allison glared at him and he held his hands up defensively.

“I keep telling you,” Allison snapped. “Minyard was seen arguing with Seth hours before he died. No one knows where he was at the time of the murder. He would have known where to get the potions—or have you forgotten what he did to you, Matt? What he did to those guys who messed with his cousin last summer? The way he followed Katelyn around like a creep when she started dating his brother?”

“Allison, that’s a serious accusation,” Renee said quietly, looking deeply bothered.

“And to be fair, Seth argued with people all the time,” Matt pointed out. “By that logic, we’d all be suspects.”

“Do you know what they were arguing about?” Dan asked Allison, who frowned.

“I think Seth had something on Andrew and was trying to blackmail him,” she said, shrugging. “But I don’t know what it was.”

This was news to Neil, who wanted to question Allison further, but was interrupted when Dan cleared her throat.

“Well, either way there’s no hard proof,” she said. “And I can’t imagine why he’d want Kengo Moriyama dead, too. So no matter how much we all hate Andrew, he’s innocent until proven guilty.”

Allison slammed her mug down and stood up, drawing her bathrobe tight around herself.

“You do know what this means, right?” she sniffed. “Every second they don’t lock this guy up, there’s a murderer loose on campus. And he’s just going to keep killing people who get in his way. The board is already talking about closing down the university and sending everyone home.”

“What?” Neil said, alarmed. “They can’t just close the university.”

“They can, and they will,” Allison said, looking around at the stricken faces of her friends. Morgan was their home, more than anything in the world. Neil felt the cold drip of panic in his spine at the thought of going back to his parents’ mansion so soon after the beginning of the semester. At least at Morgan his father was usually too busy to pay him any mind, and it was easy to avoid him. And going home also meant no more Exy, no more Matt and Dan and Kevin, and no more Andrew.

“How about we all sleep here tonight?” Jeremy suggested into the silence. “Everyone can bring their stuff, we’ll make a big pile, ward the doors—that way we won’t be alone, and who knows, maybe by morning they’ll know who did it and no one will have to go home.”

The atmosphere unclenched a little, and Dan immediately seized onto the idea of a sleepover and started distributing jobs. Neil helped move the furniture, while others grabbed snacks and hot chocolate from the dorm kitchen, Kevin and Dan went around warding the doors, and Jeremy coaxed the fires back to full force.

Soon the floor was a patchwork of bedding and pyjama-clad legs, murmured conversation and muffled laughter. As they were settling in, one of the doors swung open to admit Andrew, Aaron and Nicky, bringing with them a gust of tense silence.

“Who invited _them_?” Allison asked from her queen-like perch on a stack of pillows. “I thought you warded the doors.”

“We warded them against intruders, not other students,” Kevin said. “This is a communal space.”

There was another moment of silence. Andrew swept a disinterested glance over the group, Aaron yawned, and Nicky fidgeted and looked longingly at the piles of blankets and pillows on the floor.

“Are we having a sleepover?” he asked, mustering up some semblance of good cheer.

“Yes,” Kevin said at the same time as Allison said, “No.”

“Come on, Nicky,” Andrew tutted, “we are clearly not wanted here.”

He walked towards the staircase that led up to the dorms, pulling Nicky and Aaron along in his wake like pieces of driftwood. Nicky cast a wistful look over his shoulder as he reached the staircase, but followed his cousins up without another word.

“Was that really necessary?” Renee asked Allison, arching her brows.

“Yes,” Allison insisted, though Neil noticed she didn’t meet Renee’s eyes.

“Let’s just sleep,” Dan said, making a smooth, graceful circular motion with her hand as she dimmed the lights.

It wasn’t strictly necessary to make any sort of movement when casting a spell, but most people found it helpful to focus their magic in their hands with a gesture, and some even added unnecessary flourishes to create a signature style. Neil himself had never really settled on anything in particular, though he liked to imitate other people to find out if certain gestures were more or less suited to certain spells. Over time he had developed a little pet project, cataloguing the different quirks in his head. Dan rolled her wrist like a dancer, while Matt tended to make a fist. Kevin snapped his fingers, forever impatient with the limitations of his magic. Renee spread her hands palm-up as if inviting the magic to come to her, and Allison pinched and rubbed her fingertips together as if crushing something between them.

As he lay in the fading glow of the fire, listening to the quiet cacophony of breathing around him, he tried to picture the exact way Andrew’s hands moved when he cast a spell. It was often just a barely-there crook of his index finger, like he was beckoning—or daring—his magic to come closer. Neil turned on his side, wishing he could summon sleep to him as easily as Andrew summoned his magic, but all he could think of was how warm Andrew’s hands felt when they touched his skin.

-

**_Rabbit_ **

_Huh?_

**_That’s your name now_ **

_What why_

**_Because_ **

**_Squirrelly_ **

_…Shouldn’t I be Squirrel then_

**_Fuck_ **

_Too late_

_I like Rabbit_

_You can be_

_Badger_

_Like honey badger_

**_I hate you_ **

_Okay Badger ;)_

-

It was still dark when Neil woke up.

The last dregs of whispered conversations had died down and the only sounds were the wind howling outside the windows, Kevin’s steady snores, and the occasional crackle of the embers in the fireplace. He couldn’t tell what had woken him, but he felt like a switch had been flicked inside his mind and all traces of sleep had shrunk to the corners, hiding from the light. He sat up, shivering in the cold, and did a quick count to make sure everyone was still there. Then he grabbed a random cardigan from the back of an armchair, slipped into his shoes, and left the common room as quietly as he could.

Snowflakes swirled outside the windows he passed. The weather at Morgan always seemed somehow _more_ than anywhere else Neil had been, like someone was crafting it according to a textbook. He was suspecting the Magical Ecosystems and Meteorology department was behind it, but Hernandez had caught him snooping in their labs one too many times and Matt only ever laughed when he asked.

Kengo Moriyama’s office was situated in the Engineering wing, one floor above the workshops. It was a somewhat perilous place considering the Spell Dev students used the workshops as well, which meant risk of explosions and temporary reality warping was disproportionally high in the general vicinity. Kengo’s office was therefore heavily warded and protected by layers of stasis and energy absorbent charms, which meant breaking into it was no easy feat.

Luckily Neil had taught himself how to pick locks the non-magic way a long time ago, and if there was one thing people like Kengo never expected, it was mundane, unspectacular methods such as this one.

Neil carefully slipped under the luminous _Crime Scene – Do Not Cross_ charm that hovered over the doorway and conjured a little palm light. The office looked like any standard head of department’s office at Morgan—dark, gleaming mahogany furniture, tall glass display cases along the walls for valuable books and objects, a scuffed rug worn down by pacing feet, a small fireplace with the Morgan crest carved into the mantel, and a set of heavy tartan curtains pulled closed over the window. The desk was meticulously organised, or maybe it had been tidied after forensics had gone through everything. A faint glowing outline on the blotter marked where Kengo’s body had been slumped over the desk, and there was a handsome leather coaster that might have once held the poisoned cup.

Neil went through the papers that had been left behind on his desk, snorting at a lengthy Spellwork essay from Riko that Kengo had merely marked “insufficient” without further comment. In another drawer was a lab report and some diagrams from Seth that looked promising but had clearly been penned with an autocorrect charm that hadn’t always known what to do with the technical terms. There was no laptop, probably also taken in as evidence, but Neil carefully went through the small pile of personal correspondence in Kengo’s inbox. Most of it was useless drivel, but there was a memo signed by Betsy Dobson politely suggesting they discuss a matter of contention between them further over a cup of tea in her office. Neil filed the information away, then knelt on the floor to check the wastepaper basket. It was mostly empty, except for a lone chocolate bar wrapper and a crumpled note.

Neil smoothed it out over his knee and held his palm light closer. The handwriting was sharp and pointed and strangely familiar; the paper expensive, though the ink had bled a little. Neil’s chest went cold as he read the words:

_I know where the next Exy game will take place_. _I can give you the names of every player._

He stared at the note until his palm light flickered and died. As the wind outside quieted for a moment, he could hear the dull thud of mismatched footsteps outside in the hallway and swore. Wymack had become the head of the Magic Law and Criminal Psychology department after a knee injury had forced him to retire from the force. Maybe Neil had been too careless in assuming a simple mundane break-in would go unnoticed.

He scrambled out from under the desk in a panic, trying to find a hiding place. The curtains were long enough to conceal him, but they were too flat against the walls for the bulk of his body to really go unnoticed. He briefly contemplated the door, but that was too dependent on Wymack not checking behind it.

The footsteps were close now. Neil dove behind the scraggly plant in the corner, blasting it with a temporary transfiguration and grabbing the pot to steady it as it exploded into a full-blown Christmas tree complete with blinking lights and gaudy ornaments. Okay, maybe Neil had overdone it a little—transfig wasn’t his strongest suit. There was barely any space between the tree and the wall and the branches were digging uncomfortably into his stomach, but then the door opened and light flooded the room. Neil hastily cast a notice-me-not spell over himself—one of the most useful spells to know in his parents’ household—and held his breath, not daring to move. Wymack flicked his hand dismissively at the doorway, disabling the wards, and peered inside.

“Huh,” he muttered, frowning at the Christmas tree and poking it with his cane. “They put ‘em up earlier every year.”

He coughed, gave the room one final sweep, then switched off the light and walked back towards the door. Neil risked a few shallow breaths and waited for the click of the lock, trembling a little from the effort of holding up a major transfiguration for so long, but the door stopped abruptly just before it fell shut all the way.

“Oh! David,” a female voice said. “I’m sorry, I…”

“Couldn’t sleep?” Wymack said. The light from the hallway outside still cut a narrow swathe into the office, illuminating the outer branches of the tree. The needles were starting to come off the bottom part as Neil fought to uphold it, but Wymack and Kayleigh didn’t seem to notice.

“Yes,” Kayleigh admitted. “I thought if I was up I might as well get some work done, but then I saw the light and for a moment I thought…”

She paused. Neil couldn’t see what they were doing, and for a few seconds neither of them said anything.

“It’s so silly,” Kayleigh finally went on. “I know he’s dead. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“You know you can always talk to Betsy if you need,” Wymack said quietly, less of the usual gruffness in his voice.

“To be honest, I don’t think I’m ready yet. I had to give my statement and then I was so busy helping Tetsuji sort everything out… I guess the quiet just got to me, after everything was done.”

“I’m sorry,” Wymack said. “I know you two were… close.”

“David…”

The tree was visibly shrinking. Neil bit his lip and tried to tap some hidden reserve of power inside him, but it was no use. The last lights winked out just as the door closed behind Wymack, and Neil gasped in a breath and let go of the transfiguration, leaning against the wall.

He looked down at the crumpled note in his hand and stuffed it in his pocket. If forensics hadn’t deemed it important enough to take, they probably wouldn’t notice it going missing. And he had to find out who had been about to betray them all and why—and whether it might have had anything to do with Kengo’s death.

-

_Did you kill her?_

_Your mother, I mean_

**_No_ **

**_She didn’t need my help with that_ **

_Overdose?_

**_It was only a matter of time at the rate she was going_ **

**_I was home when it happened_ **

**_Sat in the kitchen and smoked a cigarette while she died_ **

**_Stupid thing kept going out_ **

**_It was one of hers_ **

**_She always bought crap like that_ **

**_My brother came home and threw a fit because there she was, dead on the floor_ **

_I don’t get why people are so afraid by dead bodies_

_They’re just dead bodies_

**_Pro tip_ **

**_Don’t tell the pigs that_ **

**_Or your therapist_ **

_Bold of you to assume I have a therapist_

-

_What if they close the university?_

Neil stared at the words as they dried on the page. It was early, too early for Andrew to be awake, but barely a minute after he’d written the message an answer bled through the page.

**_Then we go home._ **

_I don’t want to go home,_ Neil wrote. He’d often thought of moving out of his parents’ mansion, but every time he imagined telling them, a cold dread settled in his lungs. It wasn’t like he had any money, anyway—some students had part-time jobs at the village or worked over the holidays, but it wasn’t the sort of steady income you needed to pay rent, and there was no way Neil’s parents would agree to pay it for him when he lived at the dorms most of the year. He usually stayed at Morgan over winter break and spent the summer couch-surfing between Matt’s place, Kevin’s apartment, and Stuart’s house, but there was only so much space he could take up in other people’s homes before he overstayed his welcome.

No, Morgan was as close to home as it got for him. One day he’d graduate and get a job and a place of his own, but he wasn’t ready to leave this life of Exy and Andrew and sleepovers in the common room and all-nighters with Kevin behind just yet.

He picked up his pen and added: _Home’s too far away from you._

The answer came through almost instantly. The way the words slanted gave Neil the impression that Andrew was rolling his eyes at him.

**_I am always far away._ **

_And yet so close,_ Neil replied. _Sometimes I imagine that you’re right behind me in class. Watching me doodle and thinking what an idiot I am._

Andrew and Neil only shared one statistics class this semester, but it gave Neil such a thrill to take the desk in front of Andrew every time, feel his heavy gaze on the back of his neck until it made his skin prickle from his head down to his toes.

They often spent lunch break making out in the storage cupboard down the hall.

**_I don’t have to sit behind you to think you’re an idiot._ **

Neil grinned, scratched a little winky face into the paper, then folded it carefully up and tucked it into his pocket for safe-keeping as Matt slid into the seat across from him with a loaded breakfast plate.

-

**_Ever kissed a guy?_ **

_No_

_Well, once_

_But it was a dare_

**_And?_ **

_Dunno_

_It wasn’t like, a real kiss_

**_What’s a real kiss then_ **

_Dunno_

_Haven’t had one yet have I_

-

“…all classes will carry on. For the time being,” Tetsuji stressed, looking out over the dining hall with a brittle frown between his brows. He had inherited the position of chairman from Kengo and looked the picture of the mourning brother, but there was a new vigour to the man and he had slipped into his role with a little too much gusto, Neil thought.

He looked down at his notes, pushing his empty plate away from himself as students started to talk and rise from their seats. Their conversations melted into an angry buzz of speculation, varying degrees of outrage, anxiety and guilty excitement, and Neil frowned and cupped his hands over his ears to block them out.

He’d written down the names of the people in Kengo’s immediate social circle, what he knew about their whereabouts at the time of the murder, and some theories on possible motives. At the top of the list were Kengo’s remaining family members: Tetsuji, who had finally risen in the ranks as he stepped out of his brother’s shadow, Ichirou, who had conveniently been at a conference out of the country on the day of the murder, and Riko, who had daddy issues a mile wide and had spent his entire university career trying to catch his father’s attention when he wasn’t antagonising Neil and his friends.

All three of them stood to inherit a no doubt generous sum of money and several properties, though Neil suspected that Riko and Tetsuji’s slice of the cake would perhaps not turn out as generous as Ichirou’s, the favourite son’s.

Next were Kengo’s colleagues. Neil would consider his father a prime suspect simply on account of knowing him, but poison wasn’t Nathan’s style. As the head of the Chemistry and Potionry department, Neil’s mother was probably the person with the most expertise on poisons, rivalled only by Abby, head of the Healing department, but Neil couldn’t think of a motive for either of them. Everyone knew that Luther Hemmick was essentially Tetsuji’s personal secretary. Even though Tetsuji himself had an alibi for the night of the murder, Neil didn’t rule him out—it was still possible he’d delegated the dirty work to someone else. However, Neil doubted whether Luther had the stomach or the means to do it. He was a strict but unambitious man, his department—Deities and Entities—one of the smallest at the university. Neil drew a squiggly line under his name and considered the next person on the list. Betsy Dobson, head of the Divination, Neuromagic and Psychic Studies department, didn’t seem like the killing type either, but she’d at least had quarrel with Kengo judging by the memo Neil had found in his inbox. He’d never really trusted her benign smile and favourable reputation, so she stayed on the list.

Kayleigh Day had perhaps been closest to Kengo, and she’d been the one to find him, which made her a person of interest by default. But like the remaining heads of department—Wymack, Hernandez, Rhemann, Randy Boyd and Maria Hemmick—Neil couldn’t figure out an obvious motive. She’d even seemed genuinely distraught by Kengo’s death, unlike Tetsuji.

Magic Law Enforcement were still interviewing staff members and sniffing around campus, but so far there had been no progress, at least not as far as Neil could find out. He’d been eavesdropping on conversations and following the people on his list around as much as he could get away with, and he’d even witnessed a few things he’d have preferred to never know about his professors, though nothing seemed directly connected to the murder.

And then there was still the question of the traitor, who had been willing to sell out the league to Kengo and get them all kicked out of Morgan.

He spotted Allison about to leave the hall and quickly gathered his notes to hurry after her. She was halfway across the foyer when he caught up to her, offering her the apple he’d snatched from a fruit bowl on his way out.

“What do you want?” Allison asked, eyeing the apple warily.

“Can’t I just talk to a friend?” Neil grinned, though it quickly faded when Allison’s lips barely creased into a smile.

“I’m not in the mood for your games, Neil.”

“I don’t play games,” Neil said, affronted. “I only play Exy. Speaking of…”

Allison rolled her eyes, though Neil imagined there was a fond air about it, and led him down a corridor to one of the study rooms near the Potionry library. They found a little nook to sit in and Allison pinched her fingers, conjuring two cups of tea from the dining hall for them.

“Well, spit it out,” she said, peering at him over the top of her cup, one leg crossed over the other and swaying slightly. She had dark circles under her eyes that were imperfectly concealed by a half-hearted glamour, and her hair looked flatter and less luminous than it usually did.

“It’s about the league,” Neil said.

“You know I can’t talk about that,” Allison reminded him.

“No, I know,” Neil said, taking a large swig of piping hot tea and forcing it down. He scooted a little closer, making sure they weren’t overheard. “But I thought you might like to know that we have a traitor.”

Allison sat up straight, abandoning her tea.

“What makes you think that?”

Neil dug the note out of his pocket and passed it over. Allison read it and frowned, tapping her finger against her chin.

“Where did you get this?”

“In Kengo’s office,” Neil admitted. Allison arched her eyebrow again, then looked back down at the note.

“I’m not even going to ask what you were doing in there.”

“Do you know who wrote it?” Neil asked.

Allison examined the handwriting again, but shook her head.

“I wonder how they could know though,” she said, looking troubled.

“What do you mean?”

“Players’ identities, the location of the next game… Those are kept secret for a reason. No one knows who’s behind the masks or where the next Exy game takes place ahead of time.”

“Most people who are into Exy know who at least some of the players are,” Neil shrugged. “It’s not hard to figure out if you really try.”

“Sure,” Allison said dubiously, “but what about the court? It’s always a random location at a random time, you can only reach it by activating the take-me-there charm in the text by fingerprint. You can’t just pass the information on to anyone else either, it would just come out as gibberish.”

“Maybe they were bluffing,” Neil hummed. “Or maybe they thought they could just forward the text, or let Kengo activate the take-me-there charm.”

“Let’s hope so,” Allison said stiffly. “Because the only alternative is that our traitor is on the committee.”

“Why would someone on the committee sell out Exy, though?” Neil asked, pulling a face. “Wouldn’t they incriminate themselves?”

“Maybe someone has a grudge,” Allison shrugged. “If they made a deal with Kengo that they would get out of it scot-free…”

Neil felt slightly ill. He drained the rest of his tea and took the note back, examining the handwriting once again. He was sure he’d seen it somewhere recently… he just couldn’t remember where.

“Who’s on the committee?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

Neil made a frustrated noise and chewed his lip.

“How are we going to catch them?”

“I don’t know,” Allison said tiredly. “With Kengo gone, they might not risk making another move.”

“Or they might try their luck with Tetsuji instead.”

“Either way, I imagine our little rat would have to negotiate first.”

“But if they already did…”

“Then we’re fucked.”

Neil drummed his fingers against the armrest of his chair.

“Can you get a sample of every committee member’s handwriting, so we can compare them to the note?”

“I can try,” Allison said, “but I need some time to make it look natural. What if the next game takes place before then?”

“We’ll post look-outs,” Neil said. “If Tetsuji or any of the other professors seem like they’re rushing off to break up the game, they text ahead and try to delay him while we evacuate the court.”

-

_You didn’t tell me you play Exy!!!!_

_Badger_

_Badger come on_

_You can’t just spring this on me and leave me hanging_

_Badgerrr_

_At least tell me what position you play_

_I promise I’ll shut up, just_

_Give me something_

**_Fine. Goalie_ **

****

**_Rabbit?_ **

**_Huh_ **

**_Didn’t think you really would shut up_ **

-

In the end, they agreed that Neil would act as look-out, since having both parents on the board meant he could loiter near the professors’ lounge with a believable excuse if anyone asked, and because it meant they didn’t have to tell anyone else about Neil’s discovery just yet. Neil ached to miss an Exy game and hoped they would find the traitor sooner, but the only two handwriting samples Allison could procure didn’t match the note at all, and the text announcing the next game already came through a day later.

Neil gritted his teeth and left a perfectly good cup of tea behind, trying not to think about who would take his place as starting striker tonight if he didn’t claim it.

Naturally, the plan went wrong almost immediately.

Less than a minute after Neil had taken up post, he was waylaid by his own mother.

Mary Wesninski had very little in common with her brother Stuart, other than the small stature and the ruthless way she’d excised any hint of her native Glaswegian accent (except for when she was swearing, usually at Neil). She preferred coffee to tea most days, but if she did drink tea she had it with so much lemon that as a child Neil had been convinced her tongue would inevitably shrivel up and fall out. Where Stuart had let his hair go prematurely grey decades ago, hers was always dyed the exact same shade of brown, and always pulled back in the exact same strict bun. She was not the type of person to ever set foot in a joke shop. There was a faint scar next to her mouth that Neil could pretend was a dimple or the beginning of a smile if he squinted.

She never smiled.

She wasn’t smiling now, as she stepped outside the professors’ lounge and looked her son up and down briefly and efficiently, closing the door behind herself.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, like the only reason Neil would willingly come near her was if it was some kind of emergency.

And, okay. Maybe she had a point there.

“Nothing,” Neil said. “I was just…”

_Looking for my mother_ , was the lie he’d slipped under his tongue, ready to be melted into a guileless smile if anyone questioned him. Mary’s eyes narrowed—she’d always been able to smell the lies on him—and Neil fell silent instead, hoping she would let it go and move on.

The door behind her opened and Tetsuji came out at the same time as Mary said, “Have dinner with me.”

“I… what?” Neil said, heart pounding in his chest as he watched Tetsuji calmly walk down the hallway and adjust his cravat. If he followed him, maybe Tetsuji would lead him straight to the traitor…

“We can go to that pub in the village that you like,” Mary said, her face clearly stating how much she did _not_ want to go to that pub. “My treat.”

Neil snapped his gaze back to her. He didn’t point out that even if he paid for it himself it would still technically be her treat, since all of his money came from his parents. His head buzzed with static. He couldn’t even remember if they’d ever done this before. Sure, there were the mandatory Sunday night dinners with his parents, but those were always overshadowed by his father’s looming presence. It was never just the two of them.

“How about tomorrow?” Neil blurted out, squeezing his hand around his phone and taking a step back. Tetsuji was almost at the end of the hallway now, and if Neil wanted to catch up, he’d have to go _now_.

Something shuttered in Mary’s expression.

“Maybe,” she said absently. “If the board meeting doesn’t run late.”

The board meetings always ran late. Neil swallowed and forced himself to shrug, walking backwards as fast as he could while still making it look casual.

“Some other time, then,” he said, but Mary had already turned around.

-

**_Where are you_ **

-

Tetsuji was not heading to any of the exits. Instead, he went to the Cryptobiology library on the fifth floor, the one that Neil sometimes napped in because it was always empty. Most articles in the field were being published online these days, because books tended to go out of date quicker than they could be reprinted, and the Cryptobio students were notorious for their field studies more than their reading prowess.

As such, the library was a sun-striped refuge of brown carpets, spinning dust motes, and the faded but persistent smell of weak coffee and long-gone all-nighters. Skeletons of ancient creatures lurked around every corner, watching over their equally ancient books with hollow eyes, and the wind made the window panes shudder in their frames like hibernating beasts twitching in slumber.

There were faint voices at the back of the library, hushed and scrambled, and Neil tiptoed around the shelves until he was close enough to understand what they were saying.

“Did you do it?” a woman’s voice whispered, a frantic edge to it like a knife in need of sharpening. Kayleigh, again. Neil straightened and pressed himself to the row of books separating him from the two, holding his breath so he wouldn’t choke on the dust.

“Did I do what?” Tetsuji replied, dangerously low, each word perfectly enunciated.

“Kill him,” Kayleigh whispered. “Oh, don’t look so surprised. You were always so jealous of him-”

“Jealous? Of what would I be jealous?” Tetsuji bit out. “He had nothing that I do not have. If that is all, Kayleigh, I have exam papers to get back to…”

“We both know that’s not true,” Kayleigh said, a hint of sadness smudging the sharp anger in her voice.

“You think I was jealous because you joined him in his bed from time to time?” Tetsuji scoffed. “Because I got his cast-offs, raised his sons for him?”

“You two were more alike than you think,” Kayleigh replied. “Always thinking of the world in terms of possessions.”

“And you think yourself above that?” Tetsuji asked, sounding cruelly amused. “Did my dear brother not deposit a nice little sum of money in your savings account every month?”

“That was for Kevin,” Kayleigh hissed back. “It had nothing to do with me.”

“Didn’t it?” Tetsuji asked. “Tell me, did Kengo know that your son is David Wymack’s bastard?”

There was a beat of silence, then a sharp inhale—then silence again. Neil slowly shuffled backwards, wondering if he should call for help, but just as he’d made it behind the next shelf a set of footsteps hurried past. Neil just about caught the tail-end of Kayleigh’s dark ponytail whipping around the corner, and then she was gone.

There was no noise from the last aisle for a while, and Neil stayed hidden behind his shelf, scrunching his hands into fists and opening them in little starbursts to keep himself from moving too much. As he was starting to think that he couldn’t possibly stay still any longer, there was a small rustle of fabric, and then Tetsuji followed Kayleigh out the door, smoothing down invisible wrinkles in his shirt as he went.

Neil waited two more minutes, then tore down the nearest staircase, taking one of the hidden short-cuts which was more of a glorified laundry chute. It spat him out near Tetsuji’s office again, and he just about caught him shutting the door firmly behind himself, a small do-not-disturb charm hovering over the doorknob. Neil skidded to a halt, caught his breath for a moment and took out his phone.

_Clear_ , he texted Allison.

_Same_ , she replied, and Neil checked both ways before thumbing down to the coded message and tapping on the take-me-there spell. He’d have to think about what he’d learned about Kevin’s parentage later—first, he had a game to win.

-

_Hey_

_Sorry finals kicked my ass_

**_You are a mess_ **

_What else is new_

**_Kissed a boy_ **

**_Lost my scholarship_ **

**_Not in that order_ **

_What??_

**_It’s whatever_ **

**_I’ll work over the summer_ **

_Is that going to be enough?_

**_Has to be_ **

**_Or else I guess I’ll be washing dishes for the rest of my life_ **

**_Ha_ **

-

It felt less like he was travelling and more like the world was travelling around him. Neil had never really cared for the sensation—he preferred to be moving himself—but the fast-forward kaleidoscope of the court assembling around him, with its crowd and its noise and its flashing lights, the hard grit under his feet and the scent of the wind in his nose, was a gut-punch of adrenaline and joy every time.

It was almost halftime, and Neil allowed himself a moment to watch the current plays in motion. Today’s game was Jackals against Foxes, the bright reddish masks of the Foxes glinting as they caught the sunlight while the darker ones of the Jackals seemed to swallow it. Neil spotted Andrew in goal for the Jackals and catalogued the state of the Foxes’ strikers. One was fighting an acute case of flying piranhas courtesy of the Jackals’ defence, and the other seemed to be flagging under an onslaught of grounding charms. Good. That meant Neil could go on for one of them soon and face Andrew himself.

He quickly scanned the Jackals’ defence and thought he saw Matt’s bulk further up circling the goal. Matt was a brick wall in the air, but Neil could usually get past him if he was fast enough. He clocked Kevin on the Jackals’ reserve bench chugging water while he waited for a particularly stubborn restless-legs hex to fade and hoped he’d be back in time for the second half. Player rotation could be fast on an Exy court, depending on how debilitating and long-lasting the defence’s spellwork was, though most of the newer players lacked the finesse and training for casting anything more complicated than a stinging hex while also trying to keep afloat and chase after their marks and the balls at the same time. Kevin must have got hit by one of the more experienced ones, and Neil winced in sympathy. Then he scanned the perimeter of the court once more just to make sure that no one lurked uninvited and ready to strike, before slipping down the tunnel that led to the changing cubicles.

The cubicles appeared wherever the court was. Each one had a shower and an empty locker, though you could get at your stuff by entering the right combination. Neil’s flying gear of choice was a pair of neon orange flying Heelys with little wings on the sides, etched with his number and charmed to light up whenever he made a goal. He punched in his passcode, listened to the metallic clatter behind the door as it rotated to the correct contents, and gave his shoes an affectionate pat, feeling the supple leather grow warm under his fingers like it was pleased to see him.

“Me too, buddy,” he murmured. “Me too.”

Once he was geared up and the Fox mask charm had smoothed itself over his features, he kicked off the ground and zoomed back out of the tunnel, hovering a few inches over the ground just to get a feel for the air again. The crowd cheered as they saw him join the Foxes’ reserve bench, where he was greeted by a firm pat on the back and a run-down of the first half from Dan.

Clouds started to roll in during halftime. They looked deceptively smooth, their underbellies speckled a predatory grey, moving almost casually fast like sharks in water, and before Neil knew it he was up in the air with a faceful of rain harsh and barbed enough to shred skin. Thunder boiled on the surface of the horizon and bolts of lightning snapped down like angry jaws in the distance, where he could just about see the tops of Morgan’s many towers and turrets through the sudden dark. He spun and did a few backflips to warm up, waving to the screaming crowd below and howling along with the wind, rain sparking from his shoes and his clothes a bright blur against the grey sky.

“And here comes your beloved number ten, ace of the air, trickster in Fox clothing, one of this season’s hottest strikers to emerge since the number two, and he’s here for a rematch with his favourite arch-nemesis in goal, the immoveable, the un-get-past-able, numbeeer threeeee!”

Neil laughed and zoomed past the commentators’ box, flicking Jeremy and Jean a salute, then lined up with the rest of his team at the first whistle. Their breaths were steaming in front of their faces in the cold air, bodies running hot like racing cars. An electric silence settled over the court as everyone waited for the second whistle. Neil looked at Andrew, hovering calmly on his gleaming black snowboard, a gold number three splashed all over one side of his dark jacket. Andrew seemed to notice him staring, because he lifted his racquet and twirled it like some sort of taunt, and Neil felt laughter bubbling up his throat.

The game was on.

-

_Do you ever want to change your name and run away somewhere no one knows you_

**_Like where_ **

_I don’t know_

_Hawaii_

**_Where the banshees are_ **

_Hey_

_Maybe I deserve a holiday too_

-

The Foxes lost by a narrow margin, but Neil was too soaked and too high on adrenaline to care. He’d slipped a few more goals past Andrew than usual, who’d still denied about three times as many attempts by him even though he seemed unusually exhausted after playing two full halves. Neil himself could have gone a few more rounds by the time the final whistle sounded—next time, he wasn’t going to miss the first half just to eavesdrop on things that had nothing to do with Exy.

Neil skated laps around the court to cool off as the audience slowly filed off the stands. Most of the players were eager to get out of the rain as even the ones that had been smart enough to cast a duck’s-feather charm on their clothes looked increasingly like they’d been dunked headfirst in a muddy pond. Neil didn’t care—he was already wet, and he’d missed flying too much to get reacquainted with the ground again so soon.

When the cold, wet drag of his clothes finally persuaded him to come down, there was almost no one left. Allison was poring over the updated league stats, making notes in an invisible journal from the rune display board that was still leaking its friendly glow all over the empty stands. The floor of the court bore evidence of the spilled magic and brute force of the game, the bare earth littered with deep gouges and detritus and the occasional flip-flopping piranha or tentacle left over from a spell.

Neil flicked his racquet at Allison in silent acknowledgment and made his way into the tunnel. The changing cubicles all had identical maroon doors with gold symbols painted on them, though no matter which one you entered, they always led out to a different exit to allow players to preserve their anonymity once the masks were off. Neil cast one longing look back at the court, which was swallowed up completely by darkness now, and nearly jumped when a figure stepped out of the shadows. When he saw who it was, though, he immediately relaxed.

“Sloppy seconds?” he grinned, wiping the Fox mask charm off the lower half of his face. It clung to his hand, downy and speckled like a fawn, and Andrew grabbed both of his wrists and pinned them to the wall.

“You took your time,” he growled, nosing at the underside of his jaw where sweat had pooled to hide from the rain.

“It’s called foreplay,” Neil joked, shivering.

Andrew snorted and Neil twitched at the sudden burst of hot breath against his damp skin. Warmth fizzed up his spine like steam as Andrew went about dismantling the remaining tatters of the Fox mask charm with his lips and teeth, his own face still mostly covered. Neil grounded himself by wriggling one hand free and tracing over the number three on Andrew’s jacket, fingers swooping up over the hard meat of his shoulder and rushing down over his ribs, smoothing into an arrow pointing down at Andrew’s groin before curving back up. He could feel the wet heat of Andrew’s body underneath the fabric and had to fight the urge to chase after it, throwing all his desperation into their kiss instead and wishing he could touch deeper than Andrew’s mouth allowed.

Andrew turned him into a shivering, panting mess in no time. They were dripping all over the floor and Neil was starting to feel like his clothes would be permanently fused with his skin if he didn’t get rid of them soon, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. Andrew pressed a hand over Neil’s fly and pushed _down_ , a tiny smirk blooming against the corner of Neil’s mouth at the hardness he found there and Neil’s responding full-body shudder.

Neil was dimly aware of footsteps echoing down the tunnel, coming closer, but his brain took so long to parse the sound that it was too late to do much more than still as Allison stepped around the bend.

Her eyes widened for a moment, taking in the way Andrew had Neil pressed up against the wall, their smeared mask charms, the rumpled state of their clothing. Then her gaze cooled so rapidly that Neil could practically feel the ice crystals forming on his skin.

“Well, I suppose that saves me the trouble of looking for you,” she said, her voice dangerously blank.

“Allison…” Neil said, but she held up a hand.

“We’ll ignore the fact that you wilfully exposed your identities to another player for the moment, which would be enough to get you both suspended from the next game,” she snapped. “I have more important news.”

Neil straightened, pushing Andrew further off him.

“Did you find the traitor?”

Allison’s eyes flitted between him and Andrew. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, crossed and uncrossed her arms in front of her chest, then nodded.

“Yes.”

“Who is it?”

Allison raised an eyebrow.

“Hard to believe you didn’t already know,” she said, nudging her chin in Andrew’s direction, “seeing as you were busy fraternising with him just a minute ago.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me reading your comments and theories on the last chapter, knowing what's going to happen next: :) :) :)
> 
> This chapter features discussion of past abuse, if in relatively vague terms. Also, Riko. Eurgh.

_Tell me about the boy you kissed_

**_No_ **

_Is he cute though_

**_He is nothing_ **

_Right_

_I see_

-

“That doesn’t make sense,” Neil said into the ringing silence. “No, Alli, it doesn’t. I know what Andrew’s handwriting looks like. That note wasn’t from him.”

“It was,” Allison said calmly. “There are charms to change your handwriting, Neil. I should have realised—we only wasted our time trying to match it to someone.”

Neil curled his hands into fists. Andrew was clearly not coming to his own defence, so it was up to Neil to set things right.

“So then this is just another one of your baseless accusations?”

“We cast a backtracking spell on the note. There’s no doubt it came from him,” Allison snapped.

“Who’s we? And a backtracking spell, really? Do you even know how unreliable they are?”

Allison ignored him and turned to Andrew, who was leaning against one of the gold-painted doors with a faraway look on his face like the whole exchange did not concern him in the slightest.

“Well? Nothing to say for yourself?”

Andrew merely gave the slightest shrug in response.

“It doesn’t make _sense_ ,” Neil said again. “What reason would he have to sell us out to Kengo? He doesn’t have anything to gain from it.”

“He lost his scholarship, didn’t he?” Allison said, and something cold trickled down Neil’s spine at the reminder. “And it took me a while to notice, but his stats on the court have been steadily slipping, too. They’re nowhere near as good as last semester. Remember the rumours about interest from the big underground leagues? They’ve all pulled out. He’s just not cutting it anymore.”

“As if he cares about the big leagues!”

Allison looked taken aback by his outburst for a moment, then shook her head.

“I don’t know why you’re defending him,” she said coldly, taking a step back. “In any case, this is a matter for the committee now. He may get away with murder, but he won’t get away with this, I can promise you that.”

“Allison,” Neil pleaded, desperation pricking along his back and tugging on his nerve endings. “Allison, come on.”

Allison seemed to hesitate for a second, then she shook her head again and turned around. The tunnel swallowed her up, and soon even the last echo of her footsteps had faded.

“How long have you known?”

Neil whipped around at the sound of Andrew’s voice, still too caught up in trying to fix this situation.

“What?”

Andrew was still leaning against the door. His head was tilted to the side as he looked Neil up and down, and there were tired smudges under his eyes, probably remnants from the mask charm or maybe a sleepless night.

“Rabbit.”

The word was quiet, decimated. A little gritty and rough, like a tool left outside in the garden for too long. And finally, it clicked. Neil froze, frantically flipping through possible lies and excuses, even though he already knew that he couldn’t use any of them, couldn’t tell Andrew anything less than the truth. The line between Badger and Andrew had finally blurred into obscurity, and there was no way he could separate the two again.

“I…” he croaked out, but Andrew seemed to have found what he’d been looking for in Neil’s expression and straightened up, ready to push through the door at his back and disappear. “Wait, Andrew! I know- I know this is nothing, but-”

“This,” Andrew said, glancing back over his shoulder only once, “is over. Stay away from me from now on.”

And then he pushed through the door, and was gone.

-

_Do you think we’d like each other if we knew each other in real life_

**_This is real life_ **

_You know what I mean_

**_I don’t like anyone_ **

_Point_

-

Neil stared at the paper.

It was worn and creased by now, soft from repeated handling. All those words he’d exchanged with Andrew over the last year had sunk into this one, flimsy sheet. It had come from a set of enchanted notebooks that Andrew’s cousin had given him and his brother to encourage them to talk more. The effort had proven futile—Andrew had fished Aaron’s notebook out of the trash less than a day later—but if Nicky had known that Andrew had stumbled on a different use for them when Neil had picked up that torn-out page on his first day, he would probably have been beside himself with joy.

They hadn’t written as much lately, too busy finding abandoned corners to hook up in, and the blankness of the paper that had once overflown with messages waiting for him whenever he unfolded it made his throat hurt.

He tucked the page back into one of his Numerology textbooks, pulled a warm, sage green sweater on over his shirt and left the dorm he shared with Matt. He half-heartedly tried to tame his hair with a charm as he walked, but all he accomplished was that it now felt vaguely staticky, and he sighed and gave up. Maybe he’d sneak some of Kevin’s expensive sea salt shampoo again some time, the one that was laced with a complicated concoction of spells and herbs that made his hair shiny and butter-soft, but Kevin was starting to suspect something, so he had to be careful.

Breakfast was the usual base selection of porridge, cereal, toast, and eggs with different add-ons. Neil grabbed a cup of coffee and loaded up a bowl of granola with today’s fruit options—cantaloupe, grapefruit, persimmons, grapes—before finding a quiet corner to sit in and brood. It was too early for most of the students to be up yet and the dining hall was filled with the gentle steam of sleepy conversations, lulling him as he sat and stared at the drizzle sliding down the windows outside.

“It’s too bad, isn’t it?”

The voice jarred him out of his daze. Its owner slid into the seat opposite him with a tray containing what appeared to be a severely undercooked egg-white omelette, drooping over a bed of wilted spinach and bacon.

“Too bad about the condom that burst and led to your unfortunate existence?” Neil asked, raising an eyebrow. “Agreed.”

Riko’s smile oozed apart like the egg on his plate.

“You haven’t heard yet?”

Neil ignored him and stabbed a piece of cantaloupe on his fork. He wasn’t really hungry, but it beat sitting there and waiting for Riko to bestow whatever wisdom had driven him out of his self-imposed exile since his father’s death.

“A waste of talent, if you ask me,” Riko finally said, clucking his tongue. “But he was a rotten egg from the start. And of course the committee had to ban him after this. I won’t be surprised if Magic Law Enforcement come knocking soon, too.”

“You know,” Neil said, spearing another piece of fruit and stuffing it in his mouth, “I liked you better when you were mourning. You were so… absent.”

Riko’s face twitched, but he was still too busy gloating, thinking he had some kind of information that Neil didn’t. It was clear he was talking about Andrew, but even if Neil had been in the mood to discuss it with someone, Riko would have been his very last choice—with the exception of a therapist, maybe.

“Isn’t it curious?” Riko continued, changing tactics. “That the very man that Minyard—pardon me, _number three_ —was propositioning to sell us all out to would wind up dead…”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Riko held up his hands placatingly, though that smug, undercooked smile was back on his face.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “Just that my father—may he rest in peace—was not the type to indulge clumsy attempts at bribery by his students. It is a well-known fact that Minyard was prone to violent outbursts… Perhaps, if he was denied…”

He leaned back in his chair and shrugged, letting the sentence dangle like bait between them.

“Poison isn’t usually the murder weapon of choice in the heat of the moment,” Neil snorted.

“Hmm,” Riko said, narrowing his eyes and smiling even wider. “I heard you were rather… protective of him. Had a little outburst yourself, didn’t you?”

Neil tightened his grip around his fork. Riko had always been well-connected to Morgan’s rumour mill, but the fact that he knew about all this so quickly was unsettling. Paired with his self-important demeanour…

“You’re on the committee,” Neil guessed, putting his fork down so he wouldn’t be tempted to stab it through Riko’s eye.

Up until last semester, Riko had been the fabled number one, the most ruthless player on the court. He had tried to take Kevin under his wing, and when Kevin had proven resistant against his unwelcome tutelage he had switched to heckling him relentlessly on the court, until a nasty foul and a broken hand had taken Kevin out of several games in a row. Riko’s popularity had dropped accordingly, his playing had become more and more erratic, his stats had buckled. Neil had been grimly satisfied to hear that Riko had not signed up for this year’s league, but apparently he’d found other ways of making a nuisance of himself instead.

“I couldn’t possibly answer that,” Riko smirked, finally cutting into his omelette which had to be cold by now. He scooped some of the gloopy egg onto his fork and sucked it into his mouth before dabbing at it with a napkin. “He was seen in the Potionry department the day before my father died, you know. Perhaps you’d better ask your mother what he was doing there. Though I hear security’s been rather lax since she took over from Dr Proust.”

“Proust,” Neil said, digging through his memory. He felt like he should know the name…

“Oh, you don’t know?” Riko said, visibly delighted that he had yet another morsel of information he could dangle over Neil’s head today. “They say he had an affair with a student. Quite the scandal, of course. Nothing was ever proven, but my father strongly encouraged him to resign. Quite rightly so, I’d say.”

Neil raised an eyebrow and tapped his fork against his bowl.

“And what does that have to do with your father’s murder?”

The moment Neil asked that question, he knew he’d made a mistake.

Riko pushed his barely-touched plate to the side and leaned across the table. His damp, eggy breath slipped over Neil’s face before he had the chance to move out of his space.

“The way I see it, that unfortunate potions addict was just a practice run,” he murmured, glee swimming in his eyes. “He didn’t die of an overdose, you see? Strychnine, in both cases. Very bitter, so you’d have to mask the taste somehow. Very painful way to go. I think Minyard must have been planning to kill my father since the day he got rid of Proust.”

“Why?” Neil said, heart pounding painfully loud in his ears, though he already knew the answer before Riko opened his abominable mouth again. “Why would Andrew want to kill Kengo for getting rid of Proust?”

“Why, he was the student Proust was involved with, of course.”

-

_You are extra grumpy today_

_What gives?_

**_Nothing_ **

_Boy trouble?_

**_No_ **

**_Just tired_ **

_Okay._

-

There was a row of chairs facing the door of Tetsuji’s office.

The chairs were hard, sharp-edged and deeply uncomfortable no matter which way you sat on them, placed there ostensibly for students waiting for an appointment with him, though the real reason was to remind people at all times that if you came to this door, you were at the man’s mercy.

Neil’s nose had stopped bleeding several minutes ago. He held the stained, crumpled tissue in his lap that he’d used to stem the flow, though he’d be damned if he cleaned himself up before Tetsuji could see the damage his nephew had done to him. Not that Riko looked any better—his black eye was steadily swelling shut where Neil had got in the first hit.

“That was uncalled for,” Riko spoke up at last, prodding at his bruised lip.

“You hit me back,” Neil pointed out, sniffing back the congealing blood in his nose.

“You hit me first,” Riko said through gritted teeth.

“Yep,” Neil said, extra cheerfully to mask how hollow he felt inside. “And then you immediately stooped to my level.”

“In self-defence!” Riko hissed, narrowing his uninjured eye when Neil just laughed. “You think this is funny? Think you’ll still be laughing when you’re expelled?”

“They won’t, not over a stupid black eye,” Neil said with more confidence than he felt, thunking his head against the wall behind him. “Don’t be such a baby.”

Riko retreated back into seething silence, which suited Neil all too well. He closed his eyes, trying to ignore the dull throb of pain and the warm, trickling feeling of blood in his nose, the caked layer of it drying on his knuckles.

He didn’t want to be here.

He wanted to wash the blood off his face and hands, get another cup of coffee, and retreat somewhere into the deepest corner of the joint Numerology and Improbable Architecture departments’ library, which had a view of the mountains in the distance and a beanbag pile and giant chessboards and tiny model towns and a never-ending supply of perfectly sharpened pencils. On Monday mornings, when the Engineering grad students powered up their popcorn machine down the hall, it usually smelled like warm butter drizzled over crisp books and fresh pencil shavings.

What he wanted to do even more, though, was talk to Andrew.

Andrew, who hadn’t killed Seth or Kengo or tried to sell them out, Neil was _sure_ of that, despite all the things that stacked up against him. He tapped his fingers against his leg and tried to calm himself by making a list in his head.

Seth and Kengo had both been poisoned with strychnine. Seth’s potions had probably masked the taste, and his history with addiction had stopped people from investigating further. Andrew had been seen arguing with Seth before his death, but that might have been a coincidence. Kengo was notoriously sober, so the poison had probably been added to a cup of already bitter coffee, or the murderer had used a potion to make it tasteless.

Neil opened his eyes. Andrew had bought such a potion from Stuart the day Kengo died. Neil had followed him around most of the afternoon, but they’d parted ways after an intense make-out session and Neil had gone to the pub with his friends.

He curled his hands into fists and flexed them open again.

Then there was the matter of Dr Proust. His stomach rebelled at the thought, and he took a long, slow breath and poked at that visceral reaction.

He and Andrew had talked about their childhoods every once and again, back when they’d still been Rabbit and Badger. Neil knew the gist of what had happened to Andrew in foster care. The abuse, the neglect. The fact that none of them had been magical families, and how growing up in a deeply non-magical environment had nearly smothered his own, except for a few instances where it had burst out of him like someone stepping on a forgotten landmine, hurting everyone around him and himself.

No, he decided. Andrew was not that student. He barely let Neil touch him—he wouldn’t have-

Unless Proust had forced him, and Kengo had downplayed it, had gone easy on an esteemed colleague when he let him resign instead of reporting him.

His stomach roiled again and for a brief moment he wished _he’d_ been the one to kill Kengo.

So. Had Andrew done it?

Neil looked down at his hands, rubbing at the dried blood until it flaked off.

“Will you stop _fidgeting_?” Riko hissed.

“Why?” Neil asked, forcing his mouth into a joyless grin. “Does it annoy you?”

“My uncle is not as lenient as my father was, you know,” Riko said. “Your parents might have had some sway over him, but-”

Neil laughed again, and this time it hurt all the way down his throat.

“You really don’t know anything about my parents, do you?” he croaked.

For a moment Riko looked like he was going to hit him again, but then the door opened and Tetsuji stepped out.

“Riko,” he said. Cold and mechanical. Neil grinned at Riko, who leaned close as he got up.

“Careful how you speak to me,” he muttered, quietly furious, “or maybe your bitch of a mother will be next.”

With that ridiculous, empty threat, he stalked into his uncle’s office, and Neil rolled his eyes and waited until the door had shut behind them before getting up and slipping through the nearest shortcut passage to the dorms.

He needed to talk to Andrew.

Now.

-

_Did you hear about Seth_

_Gordon_

**_The guy who overdosed_ **

_Yeah_

_Well, that’s what they say anyway_

**_You don’t think so?_ **

_Dunno_

_His girlfriend doesn’t_

**_She is just looking for drama_ **

_Maybe_

-

Andrew wasn’t in the dorms. He wasn’t in any of the common rooms, study rooms or his department’s library, and as far as Neil could tell he also didn’t have any classes this morning and had either already left the dining hall or was skipping breakfast altogether.

“Did you know that you are covered in blood?” Aaron asked when Neil ambushed him outside the toilets in the medical training wing. He had the same voice as Andrew, but it sounded so different in his mouth—less low-pitched, less gravelly, and about two degrees more pissed off.

“Do you know where Andrew is?”

“Probably still brooding in the planetarium, why?”

“Great, thanks, you can fuck off again,” Neil said, already walking away from him.

“Asshole!” Aaron called after him. Neil flipped him off without looking back and squeezed himself into a maintenance shaft that would deliver him straight to the Astronomy wing at the other end of campus.

The planetarium was a large lecture hall with an enchanted domed ceiling that could be opened to reveal the night sky, or used as a canvas for projecting star constellations and schematics onto it. Since the Astronomy department had progressively fewer students these days it was not used much anymore and had built up the stale, dusty scent of abandoned classrooms. The scent lingered even though the ceiling was open when Neil arrived, letting in the wind and rain.

A sole figure stood in the middle of the room, where the floor tiles formed a large, intricate sun mosaic that struck out to the rows of seats along the walls. Neil followed one of its rays until he was close enough to reach out and touch Andrew, but kept his hands shoved in his pockets.

“I thought I told you to stay away from me,” Andrew said, flat and lifeless.

“Did you? I’ve never been very good at following directions,” Neil replied, shrugging, and took another minuscule step forward.

Andrew moved his face from where it was turned up to the sky and looked at him. His hair was frizzy from the rain, he was wearing his baggiest hoodie, and he once again looked like he hadn’t slept.

“What’s up with that?” Neil asked, tracing the skin under his own eyes where Andrew’s was dark and smudged.

Andrew watched his hand until it had settled back in his pocket, then he blinked slowly and his shoulders seemed to sag a little bit further. He pulled something out of his bag and tossed it at Neil, who caught it reflexively.

It was a small potion bottle, smooth to the touch and filled with a murky liquid. The label spouted some fine print medical jargon and Neil frowned at it, flipping it over in his hands.

“Mood stabilising potion,” Andrew said, wiping a hand under his nose. “Common side effects include fatigue, insomnia, trouble concentrating, dizziness, increased appetite, nausea, elongated reaction times, low sex drive, erectile dysfunction, ejaculation problems.”

“Oh,” Neil said.

“Also, it tastes like shit.”

Neil unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents, recoiling immediately. It smelled like fermenting compost.

“That’s what you needed the other potion for,” he deduced, closing the bottle again and throwing it back at Andrew. “The one you got from my uncle, to mask the taste.”

It also explained why Andrew had never wanted him to reciprocate when they hooked up, and why his Exy stats had been worse this year. Neil was impressed he still managed to play full games.

“It’s the third one I’ve tried,” Andrew said dully. “Figuring out the right dosage is a pain.”

“Is it helping?”

Andrew shrugged.

“We’ll see.”

Neil hesitated, chewing on his bottom lip as he rallied for what he had to ask next.

“Why did you lose your scholarship?”

“Why do you think? My grades were insufficient,” Andrew said with a hint of dark amusement, like he was sharing a joke with himself that wasn’t a joke at all. Something itched at the back of Neil’s mind at the word _insufficient_ , but he was too preoccupied to pay it any attention right now.

“Another side effect of this?” Neil asked, gesturing at the potion.

“No,” Andrew said.

“Then why?”

“They were never good enough for a scholarship at Morgan,” Andrew said, his lip curling. Neil could sense there was more to it, buried behind his teeth, close enough to taste. A raindrop slid down Andrew’s face, clung to the line of his jaw, and dripped onto his collar.

Neil looked down at his hands. There were still a few flakes of dried blood he hadn’t managed to rub off.

He closed his eyes.

“Tell me about Proust,” he said.

-

_Long night?_

**_Bad night_ **

_Shit. Hate those_

_Hot choc?_

**_Too much effort_ **

_Get someone else to bring you one_

**_They’re all asleep_ **

_Except for me_

**_Yeah_ **

_Wanna try playing noughts and crosses again?_

-

“I’ll kill him,” Neil said when Andrew was done.

“It doesn’t matter,” Andrew said. “He is gone.”

Dr Proust had been the head of the Chemistry and Potionry department for a long time before Mary had taken over the post. He’d heard Luther Hemmick’s impassioned speech in favour of giving Andrew a chance at Morgan despite his less-than-stellar grades and spotty attendance records at school, and had volunteered himself as his personal tutor. When dangling Andrew’s shaky scholarship over his head hadn’t worked, he’d threatened Aaron’s instead and hit bull’s eye.

Forcing his brother through withdrawal the summer before their last school year, Andrew had made him a promise that he would get him through university if he got clean, no matter what. The prospect of a future had been the thing that finally got through to Aaron, had acted as the light at the end of the tunnel that he needed to make it to sobriety. They’d never talked about it again, but-

But Andrew did not break his promises.

It was Seth who’d found out. Andrew had tried to stop it from spiralling out of his control, but gossip had spread and reached Kengo, and Proust was forced to step down. In an unforeseen twist Aaron’s scholarship miraculously survived the whole ordeal, mostly thanks to Abby Winfield vouching for him, but Andrew’s had crumbled under the scrutiny of the board now that Proust was gone. He’d worked three jobs over the summer and taken on student loans just to come back.

But that, as Andrew said, “didn’t matter”.

“I’ll kill him,” Neil said again, pacing up and down on the fading sun mosaic. The drizzle had cleared, leaving the sky a sodden, woolly mess. It seemed to poke through the open ceiling like stuffing through a hole in the furniture.

Andrew was shivering, though he didn’t seem to notice. The shoulders of his hoodie were soaked, the wetness reaching long fingers down his chest and back. Neil wished he had punched Riko some more. He was probably already back in class—or maybe he’d made Abby sign him off for the rest of the day, even though his black eye would only take a well-placed healing spell to clear up. Riko was well known for making a scene out of every minor affliction or harmless hex aimed his way. It was really no wonder his essays weren’t up to-

He froze.

_Insufficient_.

The word Kengo had written on Riko’s essay. The essay, written in a sharp and pointed hand, with slightly too much ink.

The same handwriting as on the note. The note that had come from a committee member. Someone who had a grudge against the league, who’d lost his status, who had everything to gain from impressing Kengo Moriyama and would have reacted violently when Kengo dismissed him. Someone who knew about the strychnine and the lax security in the Potionry labs. Someone who needed a scapegoat when Allison started asking questions.

_Careful how you speak to me, or maybe your bitch of a mother will be next._

“Fuck,” he said.

Andrew was still standing in the middle of the sun, damp and far away. It was like Neil had bled him dry of words, like he was an empty husk, the wind shivering through him. Neil bit his lip and pushed himself up on the balls of his feet, a current running from his fingertips to his toes. He looked around himself, but the room was lifeless, asleep.

“Okay,” he muttered, spinning on his feet. “Okay, okay. Andrew? Can you… maybe sit down?”

He took a step forward and Andrew flinched away from him. Neil stopped, put his hands up. He grabbed the hem of his sweater and pulled it over his head. It was miraculously free of blood, except for a tiny spray of droplets near the collar.

“Here, you can put this on,” he said, motioning at Andrew’s damp hoodie. He had an idea and focused his magic in the palm of his hand, thinking _chocolate_ _hot sweet powdery hot frothy hot hot_ , pulling a cup of cocoa from the nearest common room and tightening his fingers around the bottom of the mug even as the heat seared his skin.

“Here,” he said, holding it out together with the sweater. Andrew stared down at them but didn’t take them, so Neil draped the sweater over a chair and put the mug on the little fold-out table, swirling a stay-warm charm into the creamy liquid. “I need to talk to my mother about something, but I’ll be right back, okay? Don’t go anywhere.”

He didn’t wait for Andrew to say anything, just left him there under the weight of the sky and started running.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter content warning for (magical) torture

_What if they close the university?_

**_Then we go home._ **

_I don’t want to go home_

_Home’s too far away from you_

**_I am always far away._ **

_And yet so close_

_Sometimes I imagine that you’re right behind me in class. Watching me doodle and thinking what an idiot I am._

**_I don’t have to sit behind you to think you’re an idiot._ **

_;)_

-

Mary taught an advanced class on Potions Theory on Monday mornings. According to Neil’s watch it should have let out half an hour ago, and she usually went to her office after to review her notes and prepare for the afternoon’s lab.

Her office was locked, and even persistent knocking didn’t get him a response. A dizzy, irrational panic crept up his spine and made his fingers numb as he tried to think of where to go next. He didn’t really think Riko was dumb enough to try and poison his mother, especially right after their earlier disagreement, but then again, it was _Riko_.

The professors were housed in a separate building at the edge of campus, a large, forbidding-looking brick structure with large windows and a gloomy centre courtyard dominated by an equally gloomy marble fountain. It was jokingly nicknamed The Fountain Pen, even though nothing about it inspired even the slightest spark of humour. Or maybe that was just Neil. Usually he tried to stay away from his parents’ quarters, and only went there for the dreaded monthly Sunday night dinner where his presence was non-negotiable, unless his father was away on a conference or had other business to attend to.

He took the stairs, something uneasy sloshing around in his stomach that he attributed to the muscle memory of all the other times he’d walked up these stairs, the prospect of being trapped at a table with his father looming over him, not knowing what mood Nathan was going to be in that night. But Nathan didn’t normally spend a lot of time in this place, so the odds of running into him here on a Monday morning were slim to none.

Still, Neil’s feet could not be persuaded to make a sound as he crept down the carpeted hallway to his parents’ apartment. He took a deep breath, wiped his hands on his jeans, and knocked.

For a long moment there was only silence. Neil was beginning to relax a bit—his mother had probably just gone ahead to the labs to set up for class or check on some project or other. He was about to turn away when there was movement behind the door at last, freezing him in his tracks.

The door cracked open, revealing a narrow, suspicious strip of hallway, then widened abruptly in an almost jovial manner. His father stood over him, a tumbler of some amber coloured liquid in one hand, his feet bare and his shirt cuffs undone.

“Nathaniel,” he said, slicing his mouth into the shape of a smile. “What an unexpected surprise.”

Neil swallowed and took a step back.

“Is she home?”

Nathan looked him up and down at his leisure, then stepped aside wordlessly to let him into the apartment, one hand still braced on the door so Neil had to duck underneath it.

The apartment was richly furnished in dark navy and gleaming wood. It had been designed to look inviting, but not welcoming. Certainly not homely. Neil peeked into the kitchen and looked around the living room and the office that mostly served as a storage room, but everything was empty, cold and quiet. He circled back to the kitchen and found his father leaning against a counter, still holding his glass.

“Where is she?” Neil asked, leaning against the doorframe. Nathan ignored him, swirling the liquid in his glass.

“Do you know what that is?” he said. It took Neil a moment to spot the USB stick sitting on the kitchen table, and he picked it up and turned it around in his hand.

“No,” he said truthfully. There was a label taped to it, written in Mary’s cramped, spiky handwriting. It said, _Habilitation – old_.

“Don’t lie to me,” his father warned. “I always know when you’re lying.”

“I’m not,” Neil said, tightening his throat around the bile-wash of anger surging up.

Nathan was quiet for a long moment, but Neil knew he wasn’t free to go yet.

Finally, he put his glass down with a decisive _clack_ and said, “She was smart, I will give her that. All this time, playing the dutiful wife while going behind my back…”

Dread settled in the pit of Neil’s stomach, wrung-out and familiar.

“Her mistake, of course, was going to Kengo with it first,” Nathan mused, seemingly talking to himself more than to Neil. This was bad, because it meant he’d already decided Neil wasn’t going to leave this room in the same state he’d entered it. Nathan chuckled a little and picked his glass back up. “He liked to play the morally upstanding citizen, Kengo. Must have fooled her. Or maybe she thought she had something to gain from it, some silly little privilege… Stupid bitch.”

Neil bristled, the anger overspilling, but his father held up a hand whip-quick, almost as if reaching out to strike him, and he didn’t even have to use magic to make Neil’s tongue shrivel up in his mouth. Nathan looked at him, waiting, his upper lip curling with something akin to disgust.

“No, I don’t suppose she would have told you,” he said at last, as if he was just deciding on something. “Still. Your presence will probably speed things up considerably.”

“What do you mean?” Neil whispered, his mouth dried up.

Nathan slammed his hand down on the counter so hard that the glass jumped into the air and shattered on the ground. Neil had his arms up over his head before he realised what was happening.

“You,” Nathan said. “No matter how miserably useless you are, it always comes back to you, doesn’t it? So simple. All Kengo had to do was remind her of how _fragile_ a human life is. How quickly it can be ended. A life much like your own—so small, so unimportant. Snuffed out in the blink of an eye.”

Neil pressed his lips together, thoughts kicking and convulsing in his head faster than he could hold them down. He must be talking about Seth—but if Kengo had killed Seth, then who had killed Kengo?

“I wonder,” Nathan said, taking a step closer to Neil, who shifted backwards like a magnet being repelled. The edge of the kitchen table dug into his back, but he hardly felt it. “Did she really think she could get away with it?”

He chuckled, and the sound sent stabbing chills down Neil’s arms. His fingers squeezed around the object he was still holding—the USB stick, labelled by Mary’s hand, made to look deliberately uninteresting. What was on it? Evidence against his father? Against other professors on the board? Had Kengo turned a blind eye like he’d done with Proust, or had he been actively involved?

“Her life was forfeit the moment she decided to betray me, of course. But I was going to give her a chance,” Nathan said. “A chance to confess before things got ugly. Before I had to involve you. But you never did know when to keep your nose out of other people’s business, did you?”

“I…” Neil forced out, but his voice was in tatters. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t get a hold of his magic, which spun and sputtered like an unsteady candle flame in the wind. Nathan’s cologne was strong and sharp, overpowering. His breath laced with alcohol from whatever he’d been drinking. In the end, all Neil managed was: “I have class.”

Nathan didn’t seem to be listening. His attention was pulled elsewhere, and it took Neil a moment to register the sound of footsteps outside in the hall.

There was a knock on the door.

They both held their breath for a moment. Neil wanted to call out, but he was still frozen to the spot. Nathan took one look at him and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, propelling him out of the kitchen and into his parents’ bedroom at the end of the corridor, where he tossed him to the ground like a ragdoll. Neil went down face-first, his heart rabbiting in his chest, hands stinging from where he caught himself on the rough carpet.

The knock came again, more impatiently this time.

“If you move, I will know,” his father said, before closing and locking the door.

Neil breathed shallowly, eyes closed where his face was pressed into the carpet. He heard someone saying that Mary hadn’t shown up to her afternoon lab—Luther, maybe—and Nathan replying something about her having come down with something. The conversation moved on to board related things, and Neil became suddenly aware of another person’s breathing in the room with him.

Slowly, he lifted his head and found his mother’s pale eyes staring back at him.

She was propped up on the bed, almost like she was actually sick, except that her whole body was wrapped in wire and packed with explosives.

Neil couldn’t contain his intake of breath and she shushed him sharply, still listening to the voices on the other side of the door. When Neil tried to push himself to his feet to try and get her out of the mess of wire somehow she shook her head at him, pointing at the door and miming pushing a button with her hand.

Nathan had the trigger. Or, more likely it wasn’t a physical trigger but a spell that would activate if someone tried to take the explosives off her. Neil looked down at his hands in quiet desperation, trying to think of a counter-spell, a protective spell, anything, when he noticed he still had the USB stick.

Maybe Nathan would forget about it. Maybe there was a chance Neil could get out of this alive, hand it over to Wymack or _someone_.

He shoved it deep into his bag, and his hand brushed against a familiar piece of paper.

The conversation outside sounded like it was being wrapped up. Neil yanked the paper and a pen out of his bag and unfolded it with shaking hands that barely felt like they belonged to him. The words spilled across the page, grotesquely large and frantic from how hard his fingers were trembling. When he heard the front door shut, he shoved the paper back into his bag and threw himself down onto the floor where his father had left him, just as the door swung open again.

“So,” Nathan said, the door clicking shut behind him like a death sentence. “Let’s begin.”

-

_Get Wymack he needs to evacuate the fountain pen NOW and QUIETLY and DO NOT GO NEAR apt 302 he’s going to_

-

“I will ask you one last time,” Nathan said calmly as Neil whimpered on the floor. “Who else has a copy of the files?”

Neil had lost track of time. Even the pain felt half removed from his body, like he was watching someone else convulse on the ugly brown carpet, throat too hoarse from screaming to still make much of a sound. His bladder had given up at some point, and there was a pool of vomit somewhere over his head, or maybe he was lying in it. His clothes clung to him, clammy with sweat and urine, tears and snot. There was no stopping any of it from leaking out, just like there was no way to keep the pain from permeating every bone and zapping through every nerve. Pain was Nathan’s element. It greased the wheels of his magic, stained everything he touched.

There was no escape.

As the next wave lessened he slumped, incoherent words bubbling on his lips and seeping away into the carpet. It really was exceptionally ugly. Perhaps it had been here even before his parents had moved in-

“Stop,” a broken voice said through gritted teeth, “stop, please. There’s only one other copy, Kengo destroyed the rest. I swear, I swear it by his life.”

“Oh?” Nathan said. He was crouched on the floor next to Neil, examining his work. The room stank of his pain, his weak, useless body, his screams. His father must have put up soundproofing spells again. Or maybe he never took them down in the first place.

He’d found the USB stick, of course.

The broken pieces of it lay just out of Neil’s reach. But maybe the data on it was still salvageable, if he could only grab it...

“And where is that copy?”

Somewhere, a noise.

Nathan stood up and Neil cried with relief at being spared another minute. The noise came again, closer this time, and then the lights went out and Neil couldn’t see.

“Neil!”

More noise, so much noise.

“You don’t want to kill me,” Nathan said, laughing.

“Try me,” someone said. There was a heavy rushing sound, like an Exy racquet being swung, and then a crack and a dull thud and more noise.

“God dammit, Minyard!” someone roared. “I told you to stay the fuck outside!”

“You were taking too long. I did the dirty work for you. Oh, you might want to get the bomb squad in here. Tick tock.”

Someone swore loudly. The lights were so bright that Neil’s stomach tried to divest itself of what little it still had to give. Someone threw a blanket over him and kneeled by his side while more people came rushing into the room, talking, shouting. Magic burned behind Neil’s closed eyelids.

“USB stick,” he said, but it came out only as a mumble. “Might be. Important. Andrew.”

Then he passed out.

-

-

“Are you finally going to admit it, then?” Dan asked, biting the head off one of the sour gummy dragons that Matt had brought. It flapped its wings feebly, and she threw the rest in her mouth and grinned.

They were all camped out around Neil’s hospital bed, which, for the record, he did not need to be in anymore—he felt _fine_. But Abby had insisted on keeping him overnight for observation, and Neil had reluctantly acquiesced on the condition that his friends were allowed to keep him company.

They’d all shown up at the end of classes with a giant basket of snacks and questions burning in their eyes, though to their credit, they hadn’t pestered him too much.

“Admit what?” Allison sniffed now, inspecting the first coat of paint on her nails as she cast gentle drying charms at it.

“That you were wrong about Andrew,” Dan said, throwing a gummy dragon at her that Allison easily dodged.

“Fine,” she huffed, nostrils flaring. “I still don’t like him, though.”

“Fair enough,” Dan laughed.

“I can’t believe he’s the one Neil was pining for all along,” Matt said ruefully. “I mean, no offence buddy, I’m sure he’s secretly a great guy, just…”

“Very deep down?” Dan suggested.

“For the last time, I wasn’t pining,” Neil grumbled, sinking a little lower in his sheets. Now that it was getting dark and the potions Abby had forced on him were starting to wear off, he was feeling sore all over. He winced and made grabby hands at the water glass on his bedside table, which Matt passed him with a worried frown.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I was mildly tortured,” Neil said, greedily gulping down water.

“ _Mildly_?” Dan echoed incredulously.

“So, anyway,” Neil continued before she could say anything more on the subject, “what happened to Riko?”

“Well,” Allison said, finishing up her second coat of nail polish with a flourish. “He was kicked off the committee, of course. And everyone knows what he did now. And I may have accidentally cursed him a little bit.”

“Accidentally?” Neil grinned.

“Totally not on purpose,” Allison smirked. “Let’s just say, he’ll be narrowly missing buses and stepping on Legos for a long time to come. Whoops.”

They laughed, and even Kevin looked a little merrier than usual, perching on a chair with a bag of wasabi peanuts that no one else wanted.

“So, let me just get this straight,” Matt said, counting off on his fingers: “Riko is the one who tried to sell out the league to his father. Kengo killed Seth as a warning to Neil’s mother, who had some sort of evidence against Neil’s father and some of the other professors. Mary killed Kengo because he was threatening to do the same to Neil if she went public with the evidence. Then Nathan found out and tried to force Mary to tell him where the rest of it was by torturing Neil. And then Andrew killed Neil’s father before he could blow up the entire building, thereby saving the day in a very sexy and heroic way, if Neil’s account is to be believed.”

“Hey!” Neil exclaimed. “I never said that.”

“Word for word,” Matt said solemnly.

“I was tortured,” Neil reminded him. “I was of unsound mind.”

Kevin cleared this throat.

“The important thing is that everything is cleared up now,” he said imperiously. “Andrew is reinstated on the court, we can proceed with the next game as planned, and Neil only missed a day of classes, so if he buckles down and-”

“Kevin, for pity’s sake, shut up before someone murders _you_.”

Neil watched them bicker, leaning back against his pillows as he sipped more water and tried not to think too hard about what Andrew’s absence might mean, if his mother was going to be alright, whether Tetsuji would manage to weasel his way out of legal consequences as usual. For now he was warm, and safe, and most of the people he cared about were here in this room with him while a snowstorm raged outside and his father was dead.

Things could be worse.

-

The next day, everything was smothered in snow.

The air was so cold it burned on Neil’s skin when Abby opened the windows in the morning. White, crystal-clear sunlight wiped the room clean, sharp and potent like disinfectant. Neil squeezed his eyes shut and dug himself a little deeper into his pillows. A headache was pounding behind his temples and every single muscle he possessed felt like it had ripped free of his body and run a marathon on its own before squeezing back into his limbs.

Abby closed the windows again and coaxed the fires back to life, placed another steaming potion on his bedside table and then left for her morning class with stern instructions to drink every last drop. The others had gone back to their own dorms late last night, leaving Neil with the rest of the snacks and promises to come back around lunchtime. Neil was technically free to go whenever he wanted, but his body felt so heavy and sore that he stayed in bed a bit longer, sipping his potion and staring out at the expanse of white.

The piece of paper in Neil’s bag had remained blank all morning.

A gruff knock on the door startled him out of a doze. Wymack poked his head in, nodded when he saw that Neil was some definition of awake, and came inside carrying a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge.

“Abby asked me to bring you this,” he said, placing both on the nightstand and clearing his throat. “How are you holding up, kid?”

“Fine,” Neil croaked, still a little hoarse. “Any news?”

Wymack looked at him shrewdly, then sighed and crossed his arms.

“They released your mother late last night, she’s staying with Kayleigh for now. Her alibi for the time of Kengo’s murder is still sound, so they couldn’t keep her any longer, but she’ll have to go in for more questioning. Andrew’s being picked up by his family as we speak. He should be back soon.”

“Okay,” Neil said, peering at his tea.

“It’s not poisoned,” Wymack huffed.

“What about the USB stick?” Nail asked, still not drinking his tea.

“Most of it’s destroyed, but they’re still working on it,” Wymack muttered. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Did they find anything about former professors, by any chance?” Neil prodded. Wymack stared him down and finally relented.

“Anyone in particular?”

“Maybe so,” Neil said.

“Maybe so,” Wymack echoed.

Neil bit his lip and lifted his cup to his mouth, then put it down again.

“Say… a Dr Proust, for example?”

“Proust,” Wymack repeated, gaze growing brittle like he had a bad feeling about what was coming. Neil figured he’d given him enough of a hint, though, and took a large gulp of tea before changing the subject.

“So, did you know that Kevin is your son?”

Wymack had a small coughing fit and thumped his chest until it eased up.

“I’m not sure if I should be grateful or regretful you’re not in my department,” he muttered. “I was… recently made aware of that fact, yes.”

“And are you going to tell him?”

“I figured that was his mother’s-”

“No,” Neil said firmly, “I think it should be you.”

Wymack stared at him, then gave a short, choppy nod.

“Got any more life advice you wanna get rid of?”

“Nope,” Neil grinned, waggling his fingers at the door. “That’s all for now. You may leave.”

Wymack huffed a laugh and turned to go, though he paused at the door and looked back.

“If you see Reynolds, tell her to come see me in my office,” he said. “I want to have a little chat with her about a certain league. Tell her I have a proposition that might interest her.”

“Oh?” Neil said, perking up. “Is it about possibly legalising-”

“And try to mind your own Christmas trees—I mean business from now on,” Wymack continued, shooting him a meaningful look. “I won’t be so lenient next time I catch you sneaking around where you don’t belong.”

“Yes, sir, wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” Neil lied, flicking him a lazy salute before sinking back into his pillows.

He was just going to close his eyes again for five minutes, and then he was going to leave.

Just five minutes…

-

Neil checked himself out of the hospital wing shortly before noon. He’d slept some more and had woken up feeling like the opposite of wanting company, so he had sneaked out just in time to avoid the rush after morning classes ended. Matt had left some clothes for him—warm, baggy sweatpants and a giant cableknit jumper that Neil suspected Matt had knitted himself. They completely dwarfed him, but he was glad for their warmth when he left campus grounds and let his feet find their way to the village.

It was darker in the forest. The trees blocked out the sunlight, throwing their blue shadows on everything. Today St Knives was nestled into a dip that Neil remembered from a few past Exy games, decked in twinkling, floating lights and dotted with bonfires to stave off the chill. Neil caved and bought two cups of mulled wine at the market, shivering as he waited in line, then ducked into Bogus & Sons with his offering.

“I’ll be right with you!” Stuart called out of the back room. Neil huffed a laugh and pushed the door open with his elbow, peering in to check if the coast was clear.

“Well, if it isn’t my favourite nephew,” Stuart said. He was elbow-deep in a cauldron full of frogspawn, and Neil carefully nudged one of the cups onto the workbench at a safe distance from the cauldron.

“Thought I’d pop in and say hello to my only remaining non-murderous family member,” Neil shrugged, leaning against the sink and taking a cautious sip of his mulled wine. It was hot and heavy on his tongue, brimming with orange slices and whispering hints of marzipan. “I assume you’ve heard the news?”

Stuart laughed, still wrestling with the frogspawn. Finally, he pulled his arms free with a wet _pop_ and peeled off the glove charm, flexing his fingers.

“This isn’t going to work,” he muttered to himself.

“Try boba,” Neil advised. “You know, the stuff they put in bubble tea.”

“Ah, yes, good thinking,” Stuart said, despite clearly not knowing what bubble tea was. “And yes, I did hear the news. In fact, I meant to come up and see you…”

“It’s fine,” Neil said. “I know you don’t like leaving the shop.”

One of the petri dishes on the shelves behind Stuart caught fire. He barely blinked as he lifted his hand, squeezing it in mid-air and snuffing out the tiny flames.

“Yes, yes, it’s a delicate business… And I have a rather unlucky track record with assistants…”

“How long have you had this place, anyway?” Neil asked, tapping a bundle of dried herbs that was strung from one of the crooked ceiling beams. It swayed merrily, brushing his cheek and making him sneeze. Sneezing hurt, and Neil stayed scrunched up for a moment, waiting for the pain to fade before taking another sip of his mulled wine.

“Summer before you started here, I believe,” Stuart said, staring at him with a little frown between his brows. “Though it needed a lot of work still.”

“You know, I never pictured you owning a joke shop of all things,” Neil mused.

“No, well, me neither, I suppose,” Stuart smiled.

“Suits you, though.”

“It does, doesn’t it? Curious thing.” He picked up his own cup of wine and sipped at it, squinting at Neil over the rim of the cup. “How are you doing, after…?”

“After my father tortured me and nearly blew up my mother and half the campus, you mean?”

Stuart looked terribly awkward and dropped his gaze.

“Yes. Well. Yes.”

“I’m-” Neil said, stopping himself short of saying fine again. “I’ll be okay.”

Stuart smoothed down the front of his apron, smearing frogspawn across his front.

“Awful business, just awful,” he muttered, taking a rather large gulp of his wine. “If I’d known he would—but I had to do _something_ , didn’t I?”

“Stuart,” Neil said, frowning and lowering his cup. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, nothing, just an old man talking to himself. How about some lunch, hmm? I’ll get us some sandwiches from Beatrice, she’s just down the road—you like cheese and pickles, don’t you?”

“I—yes,” Neil said, “but…”

Stuart grabbed his coat from the rack, humming, then realised he was still wearing his frogspawn-smeared apron underneath and tried to wrestle it off without first removing the coat.

“What has got into you today?” Neil said, baffled, and reached out to help him untangle himself.

Stuart stilled, and Neil nearly shouted in surprise when he turned around and grabbed Neil’s hands. He couldn’t remember the last time his uncle had come this close to him, let alone touched him.

“Listen,” Stuart said, low and urgent. “From the day your mother told me she was pregnant, I swore I would protect you with my life. I wasn’t going to just sit idly by while my sister played with fire, and after that boy died, I… but it seems that, perhaps, I took out the wrong threat and made everything worse.”

Neil couldn’t believe his ears.

“You?” he asked. “You mean _you_ killed-”

“Pass my love on to her when you next see her, will you?” Stuart said loudly, finally letting go of his hands with an awkward pat. “She never does come to see me, and I still have one of her little UBS sticks.”

“You mean USB,” Neil said weakly.

“Yes, that.”

Neil swallowed and watched his uncle putter around, collecting his gloves and a woolly bobble hat from unlikely places.

“Do you think they’ll pin it on her?” Neil asked.

“Your mother may have married a madman, but she is and has always been a Hatford at heart, just like you,” Stuart hummed. “And us Hatfords, we’re made to last.”

“Like cockroaches, you mean?” Neil grinned.

“Exactly like that,” Stuart said. “Now, I will get us some sandwiches, and you can put that kettle on. As much as I appreciate a hot drink, I really don’t think you should be having any alcohol this early in the day.”

Neil quickly drained his cup of mulled wine before Stuart could pluck it out of his hand and dispose of it. Next time he saw his mother, he was going to suggest grabbing that dinner at the village—and maybe Stuart would like to come, too.

-

He checked his phone as he left the shop a while later, feeling warm and sleepy and stuffed full with more cheese and pickles than anyone should eat in a single day. There were a few messages proclaiming varying degrees of disappointment that Neil had left the hospital wing without waiting for his friends, ranging from _boo you whore_ (Allison) to _I hope you feel better soon!_ (Renee). There was also one of the coded messages usually sent out to announce another Exy game, but they never took place less than a week apart and the committee was still short one of its members after Riko’s dishonourable discharge. Neil frowned at it, not sure if he should click it, then remembered that his father was dead and nothing could hurt him anymore, so he took a deep breath and activated the take-me-there spell.

Sure enough, the next moment he was standing on the court, though the stands were empty and the lights off. It was covered in a thick, crunchy layer of snow that Neil longed to stamp his footprints all over, but his gaze was caught by a figure standing in the middle, wrapped in a thick black jacket and a long grey scarf.

“This is the most romantic shit anyone has ever done for me,” Neil said as he approached him, smiling as he looked around at the snow-covered stands. “Allison’s idea?”

“Shut up,” Andrew muttered. He had dark, purple smudges under his eyes and his skin had the sickly pallor of someone who hadn’t slept. For a moment, they both simply took each other in, cataloguing and taking stock.

The last time Andrew had seen him, Neil had been lying in a pool of his own vomit and piss. Neil self-consciously rubbed his hands on his sweatpants, but Andrew’s gaze was calm and steady as always, not shying away from him even for a second.

“They let you go, then?” Neil asked.

“Apparently so.”

“Good,” Neil said. “They would have had a riot on their hands otherwise. Can you guess how long it took until every single student knew you’d single-handedly stopped a terrorist from blowing up half the campus?”

“Hardly half,” Andrew scoffed.

“Still. You’re a hero, better get used to it.”

“Just kill me now,” Andrew muttered darkly.

“The least they could do is reinstate your scholarship,” Neil hummed, but Andrew shook his head.

“Wymack proposed a bursary for students who can’t afford the fees,” he said blandly. “With both Kengo and Tetsuji gone, he might have a chance of getting it approved.”

“Huh. The times they are a-changing,” Neil joked, burying his hands in his pockets to stifle the sudden desire to reach out and touch him. He looked around the court again, shivering against the wind. “So does that mean you’ll keep playing Exy?”

Andrew huffed a plume of irritated breath out into the cold air and shrugged.

“Look, whatever she says, Allison wants you back too,” Neil pressed on. “And Kevin. And all of us. You’re our best goalie. Everyone knows it now, too, because Riko couldn’t keep his snivelly mouth shut.”

Andrew’s head snapped up.

“Oh, for… Don’t tell me that is when you realised,” he said, staring at him. “Because I told you what position I played.”

“That you were Badger? Er, yeah,” Neil said sheepishly. “There aren’t that many goalkeepers, and none of the others fit with what I knew about you. It was a logical jump from Badger to number three to you.”

“Of course,” Andrew muttered. “Of course I had to find the one Exy-obsessed idiot above all other Exy-obsessed idiots. Do you know that not even Aaron had figured out I was number three by that point?”

“Aaron is a dumbass,” Neil snorted.

“He is that,” Andrew conceded, pressing the pad of his thumb to his eyebrow and smoothing it over.

“I was going to tell you, you know,” Neil said. “At some point. I just… needed to figure out how first. And…”

“And?”

Neil gestured vaguely at his chest.

“Sort out my own feelings and stuff, I guess.”

“Feelings,” Andrew echoed.

“You were there when they were passing around that ball thing,” Neil huffed, ruffling a hand through his hair and trying to bend his mouth into a somewhat attractive shape, though it felt like it landed more on the nervous end of the spectrum.

“I was there when you called bullshit on that ball thing,” Andrew said.

Neil shrugged.

“Well, yeah. I still don’t really believe in that kind of stuff. But. It might have had… a point. A small one. About the pining.”

Andrew turned away to mutter something under his breath, and pressed his thumb to his bottom lip this time.

“You hate me.”

“I mean, I did, kind of? But I got over that. You were very persuasive.”

Andrew shot him a look and Neil felt a rush of heat despite the biting cold. He tucked his face deeper into his collar and Andrew sighed and unwrapped his scarf from his neck before throwing it at him.

“Thanks,” Neil said around a mouthful of wool. It was softer than anything Neil had touched before, with the exception of the skin just underneath Andrew’s ears, maybe. His eyes strayed to the spot of their own accord, and he saw a strip of green-grey fabric poking out underneath the collar of Andrew’s jacket. “Hey, is that my jumper?”

“No,” Andrew scowled, twitching his jacket to cover it back up.

“You know,” Neil mused as he wrapped the ridiculously long scarf around himself, “as much as I love the court, I think Matt has an afternoon class. We could go to my dorm and make out on a real bed for once.”

“Fine,” Andrew said.

“Really?” Neil blurted out, somehow having expected more resistance. “I mean, yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

Andrew just stood there, quirking an eyebrow at him, and Neil reached out and tugged on the lapel of his jacket. There was a small rainbow badge pinned to it, barely bigger than a button, and Neil tapped his thumb against it.

“So, uh, full disclosure?”

“What now,” Andrew huffed.

“You and Renee…” Neil said, trailing off.

“Are both gay,” Andrew said, sounding amused.

“Oh,” Neil said. “Right. Yes. Good. Awesome. I knew that. Who’s Renee pining for?”

“If you don’t know that, you should really reconsider your future career as a private eye.”

“Well, excuse me for thinking she might be in love with the only person she spends any real time with apart from Alli… oh, my god.”

“Mhm.”

“Oh my god. She’s gay. _Allison_.”

“Neil,” Andrew said.

“Anyway,” Neil said. “The others are probably going to want to have another common room sleepover tonight. You guys can come, if you want.”

“We were not particularly welcome last time,” Andrew said crisply.

“Well, you are now.”

Andrew took a step forward, then paused again and narrowed his eyes.

“Promise me you will never try to investigate a murder again.”

“I promise I will never _try_ to investigate a murder again,” Neil dutifully recited.

“What was that emphasis?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You said _try_. With emphasis.”

“You must be hearing things. Has Abby ever given you an ear exam?”

“All I hear is lies when you open your mouth.”

Neil made a wounded sound and pointed at his face.

“Come on. Would I lie to you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m hurt.”

“Be hurt somewhere it’s warm,” Andrew said, finally pushing Neil towards the exit.

“Fine. You can explain about those side effects of your potions again,” Neil suggested. “You know, if you don’t want me to touch you because… That’s fine. But, if it’s about the sexual dysfunctions. Or whatever. I’m sure between the two of us, we can figure something out.”

“Or I could throw you off the Meteorology department’s roof.”

“Kinky,” Neil hummed, “but we can work with that.”

Andrew chose that moment to push him up against a wall, and Neil forgot what else he was going to say.

-

Andrew

**What**

Everyone’s asleep

**So?**

We could

Leave

**And go where**

My room?

**What’s in it for me**

I have bath bombs and chocolate and magic hands

(Quoting verbatim)

**I never said that**

You didn’t have to ;)

**Fuck you**

Magic hands Andrew

Andrew?

I can’t believe you went to sleep

Badger would never do this to me

He was my partner in insomniac crime

Andrew, come on

I promise I’ll stop badgering you

(Haha get it)

I even take back the magic hands

Bath bombs and choc still stands though

**…Fine**

:)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for coming on this little adventure with me! Let me know what you thought, if you have any kudos or even a comment to spare.
> 
> You can follow me on: [Twitter (moonixwrites)](https://twitter.com/MoonixWrites) // [Tumblr (annawrites)](https://annawrites.tumblr.com/) or subscribe to me here on AO3 - I'd be happy to have you on board!


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